Greek & Latin roots

Most medical terminology has its roots in ancient Greek and Latin. This means that, once you learn a few terms, you can learn to put them together to understand long, complex medical words.

Most of the words you encounter will consist of two to three parts:

1. Prefix → the first part of the word, will affect the meaning of the root word
2. Root → main body of the word and its meaning
3. Suffix → end of the word, will affect the meaning or function of the root word

Let’s take a look at it in a common word, first - ‘unhelpful’. The root here is ‘help’ which means to aid someone. The prefix - ‘un’ means “not” and the suffix - ‘ful’ means “able to or tending to”.

So, adding the three parts: un+help+ful gives the meaning: not+aid+able/tending to = not tending or able to aid someone. And that’s it - unhelpful is when someone is not able to/not tending to help.

Basic medical terminology structure

Breaking a word down into its component parts as above can be infinitely helpful (see what we did there?) when trying to figure out what something means.

Medical terms are composed of prefixes, roots and suffixes, as above, but in a structured way so that the different parts of the words have more specific purposes:

1. Prefix → When included, the prefix appears at the beginning of a medical term and usually indicates a location, direction, type, quality, or quantity.
2. Root → The root gives a term its essential meaning. Nearly all medical terms contain at least one root. When a prefix is absent, the term begins with a root.
3. Suffix → The suffix appears at the end of a term and may indicate a specialty, test, procedure, function, disorder, or status. Otherwise, it may simply define whether the word is a noun, verb, or adjective.
4. Combining vowel → A combining vowel (usually the letter “o”) may be added between word parts simply to make saying the word easier.

For example:

Hypothermia has the prefix “hypo-” (meaning below normal), the root “therm” (heat or warmth), and the suffix “-ia” (condition).