The roots of medical terminology :
Many anatomical and medical terms include word roots, prefixes and suffixes which come from Latin or Greek words. By learning the meaning of these roots, you can often make sense of words you may never have seen before, and easily expand your ability to understand and remember new terms.
To find out what a word means, click on the first letter of the word root, prefix or suffix below:
A --- B --- C --- D --- E --- F --- G --- H --- I --- J --- K --- L --- M --- N --- O --- P --- Q --- R --- S --- T --- U --- V --- W --- X --- Y --- Z
You can also test your knowledge by trying the following quizzes :
- Word roots, prefixes and suffixes level 1 (easy) :
Quiz 1 --- Quiz 2 --- Quiz 3 - Word roots, prefixes and suffixes level 2 (hard) :
Quiz 1 --- Quiz 2 --- Quiz 3
Resources :
In this section we've added a few alternative study aids to help you along.
- Articles - Here you'll find a range of short articles on basic anatomy and physiology topics, complete with a few 'test yourself' questions for each one.
- Images and pdf's - Just in case you get tired of looking at the screen we've provided images and pdf files that you can print out and use for 'off-line' practice.
- Word Roots - When you learn the word roots, prefixes and suffixes contained within anatomical and medical terms, you can often work out what they mean. This can be a useful skill as you progress in your studies, so we've provided a dictionary to help you!
- Games - Finally in the resources section, we've added some simple games to make anatomy and physiology practice a little bit more fun.