Cell

How to spell cell

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cell

What does cell mean?

1. nounA small room in which a prisoner is locked, or a similar small enclosed space.
2. nounThe smallest structural and functional unit of a living organism.
3. nounA device or compartment that produces electrical current, as in a battery or solar panel.
4. nounA single box in a spreadsheet or table where a value is entered.

Cell in a sentence

• The guard locked the prisoner in a bare cell for the night.

• Each cell in the body carries a full copy of your DNA.

• The torch needs a fresh cell before the camping trip.

• Type the total into the highlighted cell at the bottom of the column.

• The monk slept in a tiny stone cell at the back of the monastery.

• The biology students examined a single plant cell under the microscope.

Where does cell come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin cella, which named a small room, a hut, or a storeroom set aside for grain or wine. It passed into Old English and Old French as a term for a monk's tiny private chamber, and by the 1100s English used it for the small living quarters of a religious recluse. From that idea of a small enclosed space the meaning spread outward: a prisoner's room, then in the 1660s the scientist Robert Hooke borrowed it for the tiny boxlike compartments he saw in cork under a microscope, giving biology its fundamental unit. Later still it named the compartment inside a battery and a unit in a grid or spreadsheet. The single 'l' and the soft 'c' (sounded as 's') are exactly what make it sound identical to 'sell', so the trap is choosing the right word rather than the right letters.

How the word is built

• cell (from Latin cella: small room, storeroom)

Words that sound like cell

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sell: To exchange goods, property, or services for money.