Other forms: tissues
A tissue is the soft paper square you blow your nose into. One pulled from the box on the desk, one crumpled in a coat pocket, the little packet you keep in a bag for emergencies.
Biology borrowed the same word for something quite different: tissue is the material a body is built from — muscle tissue, brain tissue, scar tissue, the soft tissue around a joint. Tissue paper is the thin crinkly sheet wrapped round a present or stuffed into new shoes. All of it goes back to weaving, and the old sense survives in one fixed phrase, a tissue of lies. Kleenex is a brand name people use as the word itself, the way Hoover stands in for vacuum cleaner.
1nountissueA soft piece of thin paper used for wiping the nose or face.
“He pulled a tissue from the box and handed it to her.”
2nounmaterialThe material that the bodies of animals and plants are made of, formed of similar cells.
“The scan showed damage to the soft tissue around the knee.”
3nounlightThin light paper used for wrapping delicate things.
“She unwrapped the vase from three layers of tissue.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
tissue is a paper product.
Also accepted in games: kleenex
Tissue is a weaving word. Old French tissu meant "woven", the past participle of tistre, "to weave", which came from Latin texō with the same meaning — the ancestor of textile and text. The body's tissue is the body's weave, a tissue of lies is a story woven out of them, and the paper handkerchief was the last of the three to arrive.
Latin
texō — to weave
Old French
tissu — woven
Middle English
tissu
English, today
tissue
Built from
From Middle English tissu, from Old French tissu (“woven”), past participle of tistre (“to weave”), from Latin texō (“to weave”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA