The rooms of the friars or monks in convents and monasteries are called cells.

Abbé Fleuri") says that the cells of the first monks who lived in the deserts were a kind of huts or small boxes separated from each other, like those of the Carthusians and Camaldolese. Two or three monks sometimes lived in them, and for this reason small monasteries or priories were called cells "Priory (religion)").

They also called them houses and both names seem to have been derived from the slaves' rooms, since the cenobites and anchorites only adopted what was typical of the poorest and most miserable people in society.

Historical encyclopedic dictionary, Vicenç Joaquín Bastús i Carrera, 1828.