Enterocyte

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A specialized epithelial cell that forms the inner lining of the small intestine and absorbs digested nutrients into the bloodstream
2. One of the columnar cells covering the intestinal mucosa in the small intestine, responsible for taking up food molecules and minerals
3. An absorptive cell found along the walls of the small intestine that facilitates the uptake of nutrients from the digestive tract

Etymology: Enterocyte is a plain technical coinage built from two Greek-derived parts. "Entero-" comes from Greek "enteron", meaning "intestine" or "gut", and "-cyte" comes from Greek "kytos", meaning "hollow vessel" or "cell", a suffix that scientists use for many kinds of cell (as in lymphocyte or erythrocyte). Put together, the word names a cell of the intestinal lining. The word is a modern scientific formation rather than an ancient one. Greek writers had the roots "enteron" and "kytos", but nobody in antiquity combined them to name the cells of the gut; the term was assembled from those classical building blocks when biologists needed a label for the specialised absorptive cells lining the small intestine.

Synonyms: intestinal epithelial cell