The safe thing to talk about is the value of a column in a row or the value of an attribute of a row. Most people will understand either of those, and not object to that terminology. You would do well to avoid "tuple" and "element" because using the former in relational theory is a either a nasty misuse of a well understood term of set theory and using the latter presupposes the former (and anyway, as Koen pointed out, almost no-one will understand what you mean by it) - of course when implementing a data-engine to allow databases that behave in (or at least somewhere near) accordance with relational theory it's common to use a tuple to represent a row (the properties of a rowthat aren't represented in a tuple are held in metadata and the relation or table level).