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In This Chapter

▶ Finding your roots

▶ Getting to know prefixes

▶ Taking a brief look at suffixes

Introducing the starting lineup for your medical terminology team! Whether you realize it or not, most words are made up of individual parts that contribute their own meaning. The big three – roots, prefixes, and suffixes – of medical terms all work together to clue you in to what that word means. Often, they tell you where it comes from, too.

Starting at center, you have the root. The root is the main part of the word, telling you in general the thing you are dealing with. The word root specifies the body part.

Playing forward is the prefix. A prefix appears at the beginning of a word and tells you more about the circumstances surrounding the meaning of the word.

The suffix would be the goalkeeper, to really stretch this metaphor. The suffix is always at the end of a word and, in the medical world, usually indicates a procedure, a condition, or a disease.

Almost every medical term can be broken down into some combination of prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Because they are the core of a word’s meaning, the root words are great in number. There are many more roots than prefixes and suffixes put together.

Rooting Around for Answers

So what makes the root of a word so darned important? Maybe it’s because the root lights the way to understanding the body system in question. The combining form, or word root, specifies the body part the word is either describing or associated with. Just by doing that, it helps rule out hundreds of other possibilities, allowing you to think only about a specific set of body parameters. This section shows two big lists of all the important roots that can appear after any prefix or before any suffix. They divide into two categories: exterior root words, which describe the exterior of the body, and interior root words, which deal with – you guessed it – the inside. These are the big daddies, the glue that holds all medical terms together. Think of this section as one-stop shopping. If you can’t find your root word here, you won’t find it anywhere! We will not be undersold!

Exterior root words

Table 3-1 lists the root words and combining forms that pertain to the exterior of the body.

Table 3-1 Your Fabulous Façade: Exterior Root Words

Copycats and opposites

Some prefixes might look very different but have the same meaning. Here are some examples:

✔ Anti- and contra- mean against.

✔ Dys- and mal- mean bad or painful.

✔ Hyper-, supra-, and epi- all mean above.

✔ Hypo-, sub-, and infra- all mean below.

✔ Intra- and endo- mean within.

However, other, more troublesome prefixes mean the opposite of each other even though they look or sound similar. These are contentious prefixes:

✔ Ab- means away from (abduct), but ad- means toward.

✔ Ante-, pre-, and pro- mean before, but post- means after.

✔ Hyper-, supra-, and epi- mean above, but hypo-, infra-, and sub- mean below.

✔ Macro- means large, while micro- means small.

✔ Tachy- means fast, but brady- means slow.

✔ Hyper- also means excessive, yet hypo- also means deficient.

Interior root words

Now it’s time to meet the movers and shakers that best define your inner self. Table 3-2 lists the root words and combining forms associated with the body’s interior workings.

Table 3-2 Beautiful on the Inside: Interior Root Words

It’s just semantics

It is only appropriate, then, that you take a moment to digest what exactly is meant by the word semantics. Semantics is, quite simply, the study of meaning in communication.

Have you ever heard someone say, “Let’s drill down to semantics”? What she probably meant was that she wanted to discuss the actual meaning of whatever it was you were discussing. So, remember that when you are trying to decipher the meaning of a medical term, you do, in fact, want to talk semantics.

The word semantics is derived from the Greek semantikos, meaning “significant.”

This may be a book about medical terms, but we’re talking morphemes here, not morphine. A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. For example, un means not, or opposite. So the next time you look at a two-letter prefix and think it’s just window dressing, think again. Chances are it has plenty of important meaning.

Prefix as Precursor

Think of the prefix as the welcome wagon for a term. It invites you into a whole new world. It tells you something about what you are going to find inside. Prefixes and suffixes are modifiers or adjectives that alter the meaning of the root word, in the same ways as regular English terms. A prefix appears at the beginning of a word and tells the how, why, where, when, how much, how many, position, direction, time, or status.

An easy word-building activity is to use the prefixes you know and draw connections to medical terms you are familiar with. For example, you probably know that ultra- means something is extra, or beyond its normal scope. And you’re probably familiar with the word ultrasound, a procedure that provides – you guessed it – a look at your insides that is beyond the normal scope of visual exam. See? You’re a medical terminology whiz already. Okay, maybe we’re exaggerating slightly.

You might recognize many of the prefixes associated with medical terminology, because they have similar meanings in regular, everyday vernacular. For example, the most basic prefix of a- means without, or not, in medical terminology, just as it does in any other word. If something is atypical, it is not typical. Hemi- means half, as in hemisphere. The moral of this story is that prefixes aren’t just window dressing. They have a unique and specific goal, which is to tell the reader more about the circumstances surrounding the word’s meaning.

Common Prefixes

You can read a lot more about prefixes in Chapter 6, but to whet your appetite Table 3-3 gives you a quick look at some of the most common prefixes that play a huge role in both common, everyday English and medical terminology.

Table 3-3 Preview of Important Prefixes

Suffixes: Final Thoughts

The suffix, always at the end of a word, usually indicates a procedure, a condition, or a disease. Whereas the prefix gives you a clue into what to expect in a word’s meaning, the suffix pulls no punches and tells you what is happening with a specific body part or system. And, usually, it either entails what is wrong medically or indicates the procedure used to diagnose or fix it.

The scope of suffix meanings is extremely wide. Like prefixes, many of these have similar meanings in plain old, everyday English that you hear on the street. For example, the suffix -meter simply indicates an instrument used to measure something, just as it does in other fields of study. Geography, a term feared by many fifth graders the world over, ends with -graphy and means the process of recording. You’ll meet several other forms of -graphy in our medical term discussions.

Table 3-4 gives you a preview of the delights that await you in Chapter 7.

Table 3-4 Summarizing Important Suffixes