Cellulose

How to spell cellulose

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cellulose

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cellulose mean?

1. nounA tough carbohydrate that forms the main structural material of plant cell walls and is used to make paper, textiles and films.

Cellulose in a sentence

• The factory turns wood pulp into cellulose for high quality paper.

• Cotton fibre is almost pure cellulose, which makes it strong and absorbent.

Where does cellulose come from?

Language of origin: French

Cellulose comes from the Latin cellula, a diminutive of cella meaning 'small room' or 'storeroom', so cellula literally meant 'a little cell'. The same root gives us the biological word 'cell', the unit of life that early microscopists named because the tiny compartments they saw resembled the cells of a monastery. The ending -ose is the standard chemistry suffix for sugars and carbohydrates, the same one found in glucose and fructose. The French chemist Anselme Payen isolated and named the substance around 1838 when he found the fibrous material that makes up the cell walls of plants, and the word passed into English from French soon after. Linking 'cellul-' back to the plant cell wall helps fix the double l and the single s in the spelling.

How the word is built

• cellul- (from Latin cellula: little cell)
• -ose (carbohydrate suffix)