8-bit Pixelated Costume By Kiel Johnson & Klai Brown

In some contexts (such as descriptions of camera sensors), the term pixel is used to refer to a single scalar element of a multi-component representation (more precisely called a photosite in the camera sensor context, although the neologism sensel is also sometimes used to describe the elements of a digital camera's sensor), while in others the term may refer to the entire set of such component intensities for a spatial position. In color systems that use chroma subsampling, the multi-component concept of a pixel can become difficult to apply, since the intensity measures for the different color components correspond to different spatial areas in a such a representation.
The word pixel is based on a contraction of pix ("pictures") and el (for "element"); similar formations with el for "element" include the words: voxel and texel.