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I’ve been writing about veterinary medicine for close to 20 years. Even I, sometimes, have trouble understanding the vocabulary that veterinarians use. My best piece of advice is this:
Never be embarrassed to ask your veterinarian what a word means. Never.
I do it all the time. I also run home and look up definitions online, but I will ask, if I’m completely lost in a conversation.
To help you understand veterinary words, here are some tips on breaking them down into smaller pieces that might make more sense to you. Remember sounding out words when you first learned to read? It’s a little bit like that.
The 4 Parts of Medical Words
Most medical terms are made up of four parts:
Root: the main part of the word that typically comes from a Greek or Latin word meaning a certain body part
Prefix: comes before the root word or words that modifies the meaning, sort of like a preposition in a sentence (before / after, with / without, all / none)
Suffix: comes after the root word or words to give important meaning to the root
Combining vowel: links two root words or a root word and a suffix sort of like “and” in a sentence (typically the letter O or the letter A)
Veterinary Root Words
Here are some of the root words that cover many of the major body parts.
Cardi ~ heart
Cerebr ~ brain
Cyst ~ bladder
Derm(at) ~ skin
Enter ~ intestines
Gastr ~ stomach
Hemat ~ blood
Hepat ~ liver
Leuk ~ white
Myelon ~ bone marrow
Necr ~ death
Nephr ~ kidney
Pneum (on / at) ~ lung, air
Thromb ~ clot
Thorac ~ chest
Medical Prefixes (a few examples)
Think of prefixes as giving you context for the root word:
Anti / contra ~ against
Dys ~ difficult, labored, painful, abnormal
Extra ~ outside, beyond
Hyper ~ above, beyond, excessive
Hypo ~ under, deficient
Meta ~ after, beyond, change
Multi ~ many
Medical Suffixes (a few examples)
Think of suffixes as completing the root word by giving it additional meaning.
Ectomy ~ cut out (like surgical removal of something)
Ia ~ disease or abnormal state
Ites / itis ~ inflammation
Lysis ~ loosening, dissolution, separating
Megaly ~ enlargement
Odynia ~ pain
Pathy ~ disease
Ptosis ~ dropping, sagging, prolapse
Rrhea ~ discharge
Scopy / scopic ~ to examine
Sepsis ~ infection
Stasis ~ control, stop
Veterinary Vocabulary Example
Encephalitis Root word: Encephal (brain) Suffix: itis (inflammation)
What’s the craziest veterinary word you’ve ever heard?
Let’s share a laugh. Are there any veterinary words that have made you think, “What on earth does that mean?”