Why are the parts of an atom that electrons occupy called electron clouds?

Because it's literally impossible to tell exactly where something that size is

located at any particular time.

And that's NOT because it's so small that we can't see it. It's because any

material object behaves as if it's made of waves, and the smaller the object is,

the more the size of its waves get to be like the same size as the object.

When you get down to things the size of subatomic particles, it doesn't make

sense any more to try and talk about where the particle actually "is", and we only

talk about the waves that define it, and how the waves all combine to become a

cloud of probability of where the particle is.

I know it sounds weird. But that's the way it is. Sorry.