The Collaborative International Dictionary
Mother \Moth"er\, a. Received by birth or from ancestors; native, natural; as, mother language; also acting the part, or having the place of a mother; producing others; originating. It is the mother falsehood from which all idolatry is derived. --T. Arnold. Mother cell (Biol.), a cell which, by endogenous divisions, gives rise to other cells (daughter cells); a parent cell. Mother church, the original church; a church from which other churches have sprung; as, the mother church of a diocese. Mother country, the country of one's parents or ancestors; the country from which the people of a colony derive their origin. Mother liquor (Chem.), the impure or complex residual solution which remains after the salts readily or regularly crystallizing have been removed. Mother queen, the mother of a reigning sovereign; a queen mother. Mother tongue.
A language from which another language has had its origin.
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The language of one's native land; native tongue.
Mother water. See Mother liquor (above).
Mother wit, natural or native wit or intelligence.
WordNet
n. cell from which another cell of an organism (usually of a different sort) develops; "a sperm cell develops from a sperm mother cell"
Usage examples of "mother cell".
They joined them so seamlessly that we cannot even figure out how they breed: whether they do it by conventional biological cell fission (this would mean that all the information about the cyborg's mechanical part is stored in the genes), or whether the mechanical part of the daughter cell still has to be completed using mechanical manipulator arms of the mother cell.
Pollen and ovules are formed by reduction divi- sions (meiosis) in which the 10 chromosome pairs fail to replicate, so that each of the two daughter-cells contains one-half of the chromosomes from the mother cell.