cell

noun

Cell — the smallest unit still recognized as fully alive

Definition

(biology) the basic structural and functional unit of all organisms; they may exist as independent units of life (as in monads) or may form colonies or tissues as in higher plants and animals

In depth

A cell is the basic structural and functional unit of every living organism, the smallest scale at which life, in its full complexity, can be said to occur — whether existing alone, as in bacteria, or joined into the vast cooperative architecture of tissues and organs in plants and animals. The word also carries a second life entirely, naming small enclosed spaces from monastic chambers to prison rooms, a coincidence of meaning writers have long found irresistible.

Origin

The biological sense traces to Latin cella, a small room or storeroom, applied by the seventeenth-century scientist Robert Hooke to the tiny compartments he observed in cork under early microscopes, which reminded him of the cramped rooms, or cells, of a monastery. That original architectural meaning never disappeared from the language; it simply grew a scientific sibling alongside it, the two senses sharing one word ever since.

Usage examples

"Under the microscope, a single cell pulsed with more activity than the students had imagined possible."

"The monk's cell was barely large enough to lie down in, yet he called it, without irony, his whole world."

"She thought of grief as something stored cell by cell throughout the body, impossible to locate and impossible to remove."

How to use it

Cell is unusually rich for a writer because of its double meaning — biological and architectural — and skilled prose sometimes plays the two senses against each other deliberately, letting a single word carry both scientific precision and a sense of confinement or smallness.