A cell is the smallest living unit of an organism, like a tiny building block of plants and animals. It can also mean a small room, such as in a prison or a monastery.
From Old French 'celle', from Latin 'cella' meaning 'small room' or 'storeroom'. Scientists borrowed the word in the 17th century because microscopic cells looked like little rooms in a honeycomb.
Your body is made of 'little rooms'—that’s what 'cells' literally means. When early scientists looked through crude microscopes, they named what they saw based on architecture, not biology, and the metaphor stuck.
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