cyte

See also: cyté and -cyte

English

Borrowed from Ancient Greek κῠ́τος (kŭ́tos, “hollow”, “vessel”); compare -cyte.

cyte (plural cytes)

(biology, rare) Synonym of cell (“quantity of protoplasm, containing a nucleus, enclosed within a cell membrane”)
- 1874 August, Louis Elsberg, «Regeneration, or the Preservation of Organic Molecules: A Contribution to the Doctrine of Evolution» in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: Twenty-third meeting, held at Hartford, Conn., August, 1874, ed. Frederic Ward Putnam (1875), part II, § B: “Natural History”, field iv: ‘Zoology’, page 90, footnote 1:
  The low form elements devoid of a nucleus were in 1866 by Hæckel (Generelle Morphologie der Organismen 1866, vol. 1, p. 270) called cytodes (cell like) to distinguish them from cytes or cells.

cyte (plural cytes)

cyte

For earlier *ċīete, from Proto-West Germanic *kautijā, from Proto-Germanic *kautijǭ (“hut, cottage”), from Proto-Indo-European *gewd- (“to stretch, curve, vault”).

Related to cote, though the exact details are unclear.^[2]

ċȳte f

Weak:

^ Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (1898) “cete”, in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary‎^[1], 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
^ M. T. Löfvenberg (1944) “An Etymological Note”, in Studia Neophilologica‎^[2], volume 17, number 2, →DOI, pages 259-265
^ Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (1898) “cyte”, in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary‎^[3], 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.