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any ways and various books to help you learn medical terminology. This book is intended for a short course in medical terminology and focuses on medical terms, their definitions, and brief exercises to help you quickly gauge your understanding. That means this book can be worked through in as little as 8 weeks. Our goal is to give you all the basics you will need to be successful in your career, while allowing you to have a little fun learning. Latin and Greek word parts are found here. These word parts can be combined to make thousands of medical terms and understanding the basic word parts is the first step toward understanding complete words. While it is possible to memorize the definitions of individual medical words, understanding just the parts that make up the medical word is easier and faster than learning every word because there are fewer word parts than complete words. In fact, approached the right way, medical terminology may be the easiest subject in your program. Learning it takes a bit of thought and an open mind; but it need not involve sweat- ing or ripping out your hair in frustration.

Why is medical terminology important? Can’t medical professionals just use simple words like “gut” and “cut”? Unfortunately, these aren’t always specific enough. Gut can refer to the stomach, small intestine, large intestine, or any part of your digestive system. If you have pain in one of these areas, you would want to be able to easily identify a single area and have all medical professionals recognize that specific area. The term “cut” could mean just an incision, or in other cases it could mean cutting off a body part. For example, “She cut her hand” indicates an incision, but “Cut the hand distal to the wrist” could mean an amputation. Luckily medical terminology allows us to specifically identify places in the body and even what type of cut it is with words.
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The foundation of medical terminology is rooted in learning the four basic word parts: prefixes, roots, suffixes, and combining forms. You’ll learn how to distinguish among these word parts in order to combine them into meaningful medical terms.
First, let’s examine some medical term characteristics. Most medical terms are derived from Latin and Greek languages. While this may make them seem “foreign,” 75% of all English words are derived from Latin and Greek. When you look up a term in the dictionary, its etymology, or word origin, is usually given along with its definition. For example, demen- tia is an impairment of cognitive function marked by memory lo