Origins
A tissue is something woven. The word comes from Old French tissu, the past participle of tistre — 'to weave' — from Latin texere. In the 14th century, a tissue was a band of rich, interwoven fabric, often threaded with gold.
The Latin texere, from Proto-Indo-European *teks- ('to weave, to fabricate'), produced one of the most elegant word families in English. A text is words woven together into meaning. A textile is woven fabric. Texture is the feel of the weave. Context is what is 'woven together' around a passage. A pretext is something 'woven in front' — a false cover.
In the 17th century, early anatomists borrowed the word for a different kind of fabric. They saw cells arranged in interconnected layers, like threads in cloth, and called these structures tissues. Muscle tissue, nerve tissue, connective tissue — the body as woven structure.
Later History
The disposable paper tissue is a 20th-century arrival. Tissue paper was originally paper as thin and delicate as fine woven cloth — the name preserved the link to luxury fabric even as the product became everyday.
From cloth of gold to a box on a bedside table, tissue has traced one of the longest journeys in English. The weaving metaphor holds across all its meanings: cells interlocked, fibres intertwined, threads crossing and recrossing.