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Chalk Talk: Medical Terminology – Learning How to Crack the Code

Doctors, nurses, medical technicians and other health science professionals know a secret code—the language of medicine. Deriving largely from Latin and Greek, the terms used in medicine and the health sciences can seem daunting. Long strings of letters can cause our brains to blip through them in a moment of pronunciation distress. Take the word 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.' Touted by some as one of the longest words in English, its meaning can be deconstructed using the basics of medical terminology, as terms in medicine are constructed from root words. In this case, the root pneumo- relates to the lungs. Suffixes, which are modifiers found at the end of the word, describe the fundamental nature of the term. The suffix –osis means a condition or disease. So, we are dealing with a lung disease of some sort. Other modifying terms can be found within the word. One familiar term is “microscopic,” which means precisely what we might expect. Ultra adds another order of smallness magnitude. Finally, silico- and volcano- translate to a fine dust produced by volcanoes. The entire word translates to a lung disease caused known as black lung, and is common in mining communities.