Medical Terminology in 10 Easy Lessons Quiz

Answer: Greek and Latin

Lesson 1: Origins of medical terminology.

Do you feel that medical terminology "is all Greek to me"? There's a good reason for that - a lot of it is! Our knowledge of medical terminology can only go back as far as the earliest written records, which are about 2,500 years old. The earliest known medical terms are Greek and were coined by physicians such as Hippocrates. In contrast, the Romans did not have a well-developed concept of medicine. They absorbed ideas about medicine from the Greeks and Egyptians when Rome occupied those countries. This eventually added Latin to the language. While medical terminology is predominantly Greek- and Latin-based, words can be - and are - adopted from any language. You don't need to know the history to learn the language, but it does help us to appreciate why medical terminology is the way it is, and that there are sound reasons why we use some of these weird and wonderful words.

Answer: suffix

Lesson 2: Suffixes.

Most medical terms are made up of word parts - these are prefixes, suffixes, and roots. We also use "combining vowels" (more about them later) to link word parts together. These word parts are used as "building blocks" to create medical terms. Each word part in a medical term has a specific meaning and function. The basic definition of a medical word is the sum of the meanings of each of its parts. For example, in the word mammogram, -mamm- or mamm/o means breast and -gram means x-ray so a mammogram is an x-ray of the breast.

Suffixes are word parts that go at the end of the word. They provide context - they tell us what is going on. In the example of mammogram, the -gram on the end indicates that a medical procedure is involved. Suffixes usually have a meaning that indicates a medical condition, symptoms (such as pain), or a procedure. They can also indicate a medical instrument, a person or an area of study. In addition to having a specific meaning, the suffix serves a grammatical function in that it indicates whether the word is a noun, verb, adjective or other part of speech.

Answer: joint, breast, clot

Lesson 3: Roots.

Most medical words are relatively simple ones consisting of two parts - a root followed by a suffix. The root usually tells us what body part is involved. Sometimes, instead of a body part, it will indicate something associated with the body, such as a clot, drug, or body fluid. There are usually at least two roots for any given body part (one derived from Greek and one derived from Latin). For example, -mast- (Gr) and -mamm- (L) both mean breast, hence we have medical terms such as mastectomy and mammogram.

Long medical words are usually long because they contain two or three roots, listing the body parts involved. They look scary but they can be easily broken down. For example, hysterosalpingo-oophorectomy looks hideous but it breaks down into three roots - hyster/o (uterus/womb), salping/o (fallopian tube), and oophor/o (ovary) - and the suffix -ectomy (removal of). So the word means removal of the uterus, tubes and ovaries. In other words, a total hysterectomy. The three roots tell you which body parts are involved and the suffix tells you what is happening to them. (P.S. The hyphen in there merely stops you having three o's in a row and helps you to pronounce the word. The first "o" at the end of salpingo rhymes with "toe", the other two at the beginning of oophor/o rhyme with "too").

Answer: a vowel (such as o)

Lesson 4: Combining vowels.

Sometimes word parts go together nicely; e.g. -mast- and -ectomy make mastectomy. Sometimes word parts don't go together; e.g. -mamm- and -gram make "mammgram", which sounds awkward. When this happens, we use a vowel like "o" to connect the two word parts. We call these "combining vowels". Mammogram sounds much better than "mamm-gram" and rolls off the tongue more easily. Combining vowels have no meaning in themselves - they are simply a letter of the alphabet. Their function is to aid pronunciation.

Every root has a particular combining vowel associated with it and it is almost always "o". Of all the hundred of roots, only about a dozen or so have vowels that are not "o". This makes spelling so much easier - if you don't know how to spell a word, just remember that the vowel sound in the middle is almost always "o".

In some medical books, you will come across a word part called a "combining form". This is the root with its associated vowel. For example, -mamm- is the root, mamm/o is the combining form (root plus combining vowel). When we write a root out, it is customary to write it with hyphens on either side (because this is where other word parts can join on); hence -mast- and -mamm-. When we write a root with its associated vowel, it is customary to write it as mast/o and mamm/o (with a forward slash separating the root and the vowel, and no hyphens). It's not really that important - it's just convention.

Answer: prefix

Lesson 5: Prefixes.

Prefixes are used at the beginning of medical terms. Not all medical terms include a prefix. (As previously stated, most medical terms consist of a root and a suffix only). Where they are used, prefixes are generally descriptive and provide information about quantity, quality, size, position, speed and time, or they indicate negativity (i.e. they have meanings such as no, not, against, or absent). For example, in the medical term gastrectomy, -gastr- means stomach, and -ectomy means removal of. If we add the prefix hemi- (which means half), it indicates quantity. Hemigastrectomy means removal of half of the stomach. The more word parts there are in a word, the more specific the definition becomes. Prefixes are easy to learn because most of the prefixes in medical terminology are also used in our everyday English and are likely to be familiar.

Answer: gastroenteritis

Lesson 6: Adopted foreign words.

Gastroenteritis is a word constructed of word parts: gastr/o (stomach), enter- (intestine) and -itis (infection or inflammation). The other words are all adopted from Latin; scalpel (knife), forceps (tongs) and cancer (crab). Medical terminology adopts words from any language, not just Greek or Latin. If you can't break down a medical word into word parts, then there's a good chance the word has been adopted from another language. With respect to the reason why "cancer" (Latin for crab) was used to name this disease, Ancient Greek and Roman physicians had a tendency to name medical phenomena after things they observed in nature and the world around them. They noted the behaviour of a crab was similar to the behaviour of the disease - just as a crab grabs its prey and does not let go, the disease is similar in that the patient is not "released" and eventually dies.

Answer: eponym

Lesson 7: Eponyms.

Most medical eponyms are named after real people, particularly doctors or scientists. Some are named after places (Ebola virus and Lyme disease), fictional characters (Munchausen's syndrome), Biblical characters (Adam's apple), and mythological characters (narcissism/Narcissus). Legionnaire's disease derived its name from an event - the American Legion convention held in Philadelphia in 1976.

There are a number of issues inherent in the use of eponyms. They are difficult to spell and format because many of the names are foreign, no rules govern the spelling of names, and one has to contend with the correct use of capital letters and apostrophes. However, the main problem is that eponyms are non-descriptive and non-informative. If you've never heard of a particular eponym before, you won't know what it means and the term is unlikely to give you any clues. With "proper" medical terminology, even if you have never seen a particular word before, there's a good chance you can break down the word into its parts and take a guess, if you know some basic word parts. For example, you might never have heard of Bright's disease and, upon hearing the name, you'd be none the wiser. But if the alternative name of nephritis was used, and if you know that nephr/o means kidney and -itis means infection or inflammation, you can work out what nephritis means. Even if you only know one of the two word parts, you would at least have some idea of context (i.e. it's something to do with the kidney, or it's an infection or inflammatory condition of something). In many medical schools, students are officially discouraged from using eponyms and are required to use "proper" medical terms instead.

Answer: They are universal in their usage

Lesson 8: Abbreviations

It is claimed that the medical profession uses abbreviations more than any other profession. I don't know if that is true but it is believable considering that you can buy dictionaries that contain nothing but abbreviations, such as Neil Davis's "Medical Abbreviations: 32,000 Conveniences at the Expense of Communication and Safety". They certainly comprise a significant part of the medical language.

Abbreviations are an excellent way to keep medical information confidential as it is like using code. However, they do create problems in that they can stand for more than one thing. For example, DOA can mean dead on arrival, date of admission, or date of accident. They are not universal or standardised. Therefore, if an abbreviation is misunderstood, there is the potential for the patient to be harmed.

A good rule of thumb for writing abbreviations is as follows. If it stands for something in English, then it is written in uppercase with no punctuation marks (e.g. CPR, AIDS, PMS). If it stands for something in Latin, then it is written the opposite way, i.e. lower case with punctuation marks. For example, the abbreviation b.i.d. (meaning twice a day in English) stands for "bis in die" in Latin.

Answer: AIDS

Lesson 9: Acronyms

All acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms. An acronym is a special type of abbreviation - it is an abbreviation that is pronounced as a word. AIDS, therefore, is an acronym because we pronounce it as a word (aids), rather than by spelling out the individual letters. The other three abbreviations - DOA, PMS and CPR - are pronounced as individual letters. The word acronym is derived from the Greek "akros" meaning highest, tip, or top, and "onym" meaning name. It alludes to the fact that the acronym is usually formed by taking the "tip" or first letter(s) of each component word.

Answer: Noah Webster

Lesson 10: Spelling

Why is there a difference between British and American spelling? The American method of spelling was a direct result of the American War of Independence in the 18th century. America deliberately chose to differentiate itself from Britain and spelling was just one of the ways in which this was achieved, largely due to the efforts of Noah Webster (1758-1843). He was an American lexicographer, spelling reformer, author and editor of a number of spelling books and dictionaries. Through his publications, he changed the spelling of words so that they became "Americanized". He chose "s" over "c" in words like practice, he changed the -re ending to -er in words like centre, and dropped the silent vowels in words like the "u" in tumour (tumor), the "a" in haemophilia (hemophilia), and the "o" in diarrhoea (diarrhea). For those of you who find spelling difficult, thanks for nothing, Noah!