Enterocytes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Specialized absorptive cells that line the inner surface of the small intestine and take up nutrients from digested food
2. The columnar cells covering the intestinal lining that absorb digested nutrients into the body after food has been broken down
3. Epithelial cells of the gut wall, particularly in the small intestine, responsible for absorbing dietary molecules into the bloodstream

Etymology: "Enterocytes" is the plural of "enterocyte," a term for the cells lining the small intestine that absorb nutrients from digested food. The word is built from two Greek-derived parts: "entero-," from Greek "enteron," meaning "intestine" or "gut," and "-cyte," from Greek "kytos," meaning "hollow vessel" or "cell." The pairing follows the modern scientific habit of joining classical roots to name newly described structures, and the "-cyte" element, meaning cell, is used across biology in words such as "lymphocyte" and "erythrocyte." The "-cyte" ending is the more useful clue to how the word was formed. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biologists who identified distinct cell types coined names by attaching "-cyte" to a descriptive prefix, so the word tells you both what the cell is and where it sits in the body. An enterocyte is therefore simply an intestinal cell, named by anatomists for its location rather than for any particular function.

Synonyms: intestinal epithelial cell