A gamete is a reproductive cell that fuses with another gamete during fertilization to form a zygote, which develops into a new organism. In humans, the male gamete is the sperm, and the female gamete is the egg or ovum.
A gamete has half the number of chromosomes as a normal body cell, which is called a somatic cell. This is because gametes are produced through a process called meiosis, which reduces the number of chromosomes in a cell by half. In humans, a normal body cell contains 46 chromosomes, but a gamete contains only 23 chromosomes. When a sperm and egg fuse during fertilization, the resulting zygote has the full complement of 46 chromosomes again.