As a student or a healthcare practitioner, understanding medical terminology is vital to working and engaging within the healthcare field. Knowing medical word roots, prefixes, and suffixes will propel your understanding of medical content and records.

This page contains a reference sheet of the most commonly used word roots, prefixes, and suffixes to learn, but first, it is essential to understand the organization and combination of medical terms.   

A medical word will consist of one or all of these word parts:

• Medical word root and its combining form
• Prefix
• Suffix

Also, you may never have seen a medical term word before, but if you know the word parts associated with the medical term, you will be able to define and understand that medical term. For example:

• Choledocholithiasis
  • chol/e
  • doch/o
  • lith/o
  • -iasis
• Esophagogastroduodenoscopy
  • esophag/o
  • gastr/o
  • duoden/o
  • -scopy

If you know the word parts of these medical terms, you will be able to define and understand what this medical term means : )