Roots: which part of the body the word is about
Start here, and start out loud. Twelve questions, all of them single word parts, and the fastest round on the page for anyone who has done a term of terminology - which is exactly what you want first, because the point of an opening round is to get the room answering rather than to separate it. Allow ten seconds each and read the root twice, because these words live or die on one syllable: ilium is a hip bone and ileum is a stretch of small intestine, and a student who hears that difference once will keep it.
If you are teaching rather than hosting, run this round as a build. Take the answer, then ask the group for one more word carrying the same root before you move on - a root that has only ever appeared in one word has not been learned yet. Osteo- pulls osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and osteotomy; rhino- pulls rhinitis, rhinoplasty and rhinovirus, which is the common cold. That one extra step is the difference between a quiz and a lesson, and it costs about fifteen seconds a question.
Two of the twelve are true-or-false, and both are aimed at the same habit: taking a root on trust because an English word near it sounds medical. The cure is to learn a root together with the one it is most often confused with, and the confusion then has nowhere to go.
Q1.The medical root "cardio", from Greek, refers to which organ of the human body?Tap to reveal
Answer: The heart
From Greek kardia. It sits inside carditis (inflamed heart), cardiomegaly (enlarged heart) and cardiology, so once the root is known only the ending has to be read.
Q2."Gastro" is a common medical root, taken from the Greek word gaster. What does it mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stomach
Gastritis, gastroscopy and gastrectomy all start here. Gastroenterology adds entero- (intestine), which is why one specialist covers the whole digestive tract rather than the stomach alone.
Q3.The root "arthro" is of Greek origin. Which part of the body does it refer to?Tap to reveal
Answer: A joint
Greek arthron, joint. Same root, three endings: arthritis is inflammation of a joint, arthroscopy looks inside one, arthroplasty rebuilds one.
Q4.True or false: the root "hepato", which derives from Greek, refers to the kidney.Tap to reveal
Answer: False - it refers to the liver
Greek hepar, hepatos, liver: hepatitis, hepatomegaly, hepatology. The kidney has its own pair of roots, nephro- from Greek and ren- from Latin.
Q5.The prefix of Greek origin "oto" is used in medical terminology to refer to which body part?Tap to reveal
Answer: The ear
Greek ous, otos. Otitis media is inflammation of the middle ear and an otoscope is what the doctor looks in with. The specialist is an otolaryngologist - ear plus larynx, from the Greek - while the everyday name for the same specialty, ENT, spells out ear, nose and throat in English instead.
Q6.The term "blepharo" derives from Greek and refers to which part of the body?Tap to reveal
Answer: The eyelid
Greek blepharon. Blepharoptosis is a drooping eyelid, blepharitis an inflamed one. The eye itself is ophthalmo-, the cornea kerato- and the iris irido-, so four words that sound like one region are in fact four different structures.
Q7.The medical prefix "bucco" refers to which part of the head?Tap to reveal
Answer: The cheek
Latin bucca, cheek. It survives in a practical place: a buccal tablet is held between the cheek and the gum so the drug crosses the mucous membrane instead of going through the stomach.
Q8.The word "phlebo" comes from a Greek root meaning "to gush" or "to overflow". Which part of the body does it name?Tap to reveal
Answer: The veins
Greek phleps, phlebos. Phlebitis is an inflamed vein and phlebotomy is cutting one, which is why the person who draws your blood is a phlebotomist. Arteries take arterio- instead.
Q9.The medical prefix "oophoro", from Greek, refers to which part of the body?Tap to reveal
Answer: The ovary
Greek oophoron, egg-bearing. An oophorectomy removes an ovary; a salpingo-oophorectomy takes the fallopian tube with it. The Latin-derived ovario- names the same organ, so both spellings appear in one chart.
Q10.The word "adeno", deriving from Greek, refers to which kind of structure?Tap to reveal
Answer: A gland
Greek aden, gland. An adenoma is a benign glandular tumor and adenitis an inflamed gland. The adenoids children have removed are the catch: they are not glands at all but a pad of lymphoid immune tissue behind the nose, named by early anatomists for looking gland-like.
Q11.True or false: the two terms "nephro" and "ren" both refer to the kidneys.Tap to reveal
Answer: True
Greek nephros and Latin renes. The Greek root tends to supply disease and surgery words - nephritis, nephrectomy, nephrology - while the Latin one supplies the plain anatomical adjective, as in renal artery and renal failure.
Q12.The term "encephalon", meaning the brain of a vertebrate, derives from a Greek word meaning what?Tap to reveal
Answer: In the head
From en (in) plus kephale (head). It gives encephalitis, inflammation of the brain, and electroencephalogram, the written record of the brain's electrical activity.
Prefixes and suffixes: what is happening to it
This is the round that does the real work, and the one to slow down for. A root only names a place; the prefix and the suffix carry the meaning a clinician acts on. Twelve questions here, mixed easy to hard, and the pattern behind almost all of them is the same three-part skeleton: prefix, root, suffix. Rhinoplasty and rhinorrhea share a root and differ only in the ending, and a student who sees that stops learning words one at a time.
Make the opposites explicit as you go, because they are examined as pairs and misread as pairs. Macro- against micro-, intra- against inter-, ab- away from against ad- towards, ante- before against post- after. The pair that matters most outside an exam room is the one that measures quantity: two letters in the middle of a long word are the whole difference between too much of a substance and too little of it, and the two states are treated in opposite directions.
One warning before the round, because it produces the commonest wrong answer in the section rather than any kind of trick: an ending describes what is happening to a tissue, never what caused it. Tendinitis from kneeling or typing too long and appendicitis from a blocked appendix carry the same ending and nothing else in common - one has an organism in it and the other has none at all. Teachers who make that point once tend not to have to make it twice.
Q1.What does the prefix "tachy-" mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Too fast
Greek tachys, swift, as in tachometer. Tachycardia is a resting adult heart rate above roughly 100 beats a minute. Its opposite prefix is brady-.
Q2.The suffix "-itis" refers to what condition?Tap to reveal
Answer: Inflammation
Hepatitis, tendinitis, appendicitis, bursitis. It says the tissue is inflamed, not that anything has infected it - bursitis from kneeling too long has no organism in it.
Q3.Enter(o) means intestine, hepat(o) means liver and pharyng(o) means pharynx. Which term means "inflammation of the liver"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hepatitis
hepat- plus -itis, and nothing more. The near-misses show the other endings at work: hepatomegaly is enlargement, hepatorrhaphy is stitching, hepatic just means pertaining to the liver.
Q4.Cardi(o) means heart. Which term means a slow heartbeat?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bradycardia
Greek bradys, slow - a prefix, not a suffix. Below about 60 beats a minute, which is a finding rather than automatically a problem: trained endurance athletes often sit in the fifties.
Q5.Erythrocytes are blood cells consisting mainly of hemoglobin. What does "erythro" mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Red
The color roots are a cheap set of marks in any exam: erythro- red, leuko- white, melano- black, cyano- blue, chloro- green. Hence erythrocyte and leukocyte, erythema on the skin and cyanosis at the lips.
Q6.True or false: the term "thrombo", which comes from Greek, refers to a blood clot.Tap to reveal
Answer: True
Greek thrombos, clot. The distinction the words carry is where it sits: a thrombus forms and stays put, an embolus breaks free and travels until it blocks a vessel somewhere else.
Q7."Onco", from the Greek word onkos, refers to what?Tap to reveal
Answer: A tumor
Onkos means bulk or mass, which gives oncology and oncogene. The other cancer root is carcino-, from karkinos, crab - ancient writers thought the swollen vessels around a tumor looked like a crab's legs.
Q8.Aden(o) means gland and adren(o) the adrenal glands. Which term means "enlargement of the adrenal glands"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Adrenomegaly
The suffix -megaly means enlargement, as in cardiomegaly and splenomegaly. Ad-renal itself means beside the kidney, which is exactly where the two glands sit.
Q9.Blood is named by hem(o) or hemat(o). Which word means "breaking down or destroying blood cells"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hemolysis
The suffix -lysis means loosening or breaking apart, the same ending as in dialysis and hydrolysis. Do not confuse it with hemoptysis, coughing blood, or a hemostat, the clamp that stops bleeding.
Q10.My(o) means muscle. Myorrhexis is painful and can happen when you overexert - what is it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Rupture or tearing of a muscle
The ending -rrhexis means rupture. Three near neighbours worth separating: -rrhaphy is stitching, -rrhagia is a bursting flow of blood, -rrhea is a steady discharge, as in diarrhea.
Q11.Derm(o) and dermat(o) mean skin. Which term refers to any generalized skin disease?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dermatosis
The suffix -osis means a condition or process with no inflammation implied, which is what separates it from dermatitis. It runs through fibrosis, thrombosis and halitosis too.
Q12.Onych(o) refers to the nails. What is the habit of biting one's nails called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Onychophagia
onycho- nail plus -phagia, eating. The same ending gives dysphagia, difficult swallowing, and aerophagia, swallowing air. Nearby: onychomycosis is a fungal nail infection and onychomalacia a softened nail.
Procedures and examinations: -scopy, -graphy, -tomy
Nine questions on the endings that turn a body part into something done to it, and the round where guessing works best - which makes it a good one to play with a mixed group. Four endings cover most of what a hospital does: -scopy is looking with an instrument, -graphy is making a record, -tomy is cutting, -ectomy is removing. Add -plasty for repair and -centesis for puncturing to drain, and a beginner can decode most of an operating list.
Two of the nine are the doctor's own verbs rather than surgery, and they belong to the classic four-step order of a physical examination: inspection, palpation, percussion, auscultation. Reading those four out loud in that order before the round tends to be the moment people realise that the vocabulary was never designed to exclude them - it is just older than English medicine.
The odd word here is strabotomy, worth keeping precisely because nobody has heard it: it is the one term in the round whose root names a defect rather than an organ, and it will beat a room that has stopped reading the endings.
Q1.Angiography is a medical procedure that explores which of these?Tap to reveal
Answer: Blood vessels
Greek angeion, vessel, plus -graphy, making a record: contrast dye is injected and imaged. Keep the family straight - -graphy is the process, -graph the instrument, -gram the picture it produces.
Q2.Which internal organ is examined during a cystoscopy?Tap to reveal
Answer: The urinary bladder
Cysto- means bladder or fluid-filled sac and -scopy means looking; the cystoscope goes in through the urethra. The same root gives cystitis and cystectomy.
Q3.Otoscopy is an examination of which body part?Tap to reveal
Answer: The ear
Done with an otoscope, a light and a magnifying lens on a cone. What the examiner is looking for first is the eardrum, which is pearly gray and slightly translucent when healthy.
Q4.Strabotomy is a surgical procedure carried out on which part of the body?Tap to reveal
Answer: The eye
From strabos, squinting - the source of strabismus, the condition where the eyes do not aim at the same point. The surgeon cuts and repositions an eye muscle so they do.
Q5.Rhizotomy is a surgical procedure performed on which part of the body?Tap to reveal
Answer: The spinal cord
Greek rhiza, root: selected nerve roots are severed to relieve severe spasticity or chronic pain. Note the endings - a rhizotomy cuts, a -ectomy would remove.
Q6.Myotomy is a surgical procedure performed on which of these?Tap to reveal
Answer: Muscle
my(o) plus -tomy, cutting muscle. The best known is the Heller myotomy, which divides the tight ring of muscle at the base of the esophagus in achalasia so food can pass.
Q7.Lithotomy is the surgical removal of which of these?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stones
Greek lithos, stone, and tomos, cut - one of the oldest operations on record, performed for bladder stones long before anesthesia. The surgical lithotomy position is named after it.
Q8.During a physical exam the doctor says he wants to auscultate your heart. Which instrument will he use?Tap to reveal
Answer: A stethoscope
Latin auscultare, to listen; the instrument is stethos, chest, plus skopein, to examine. Rene Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube in 1816 and the principle has not changed since.
Q9.To palpate your thyroid gland, which part of your body will the doctor touch?Tap to reveal
Answer: The neck
Latin palpare, to touch gently. The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland sitting below the larynx and across the windpipe, and the examiner often asks you to swallow so it moves under the fingers.
Conditions doctors name in a single word
Thirteen questions, the hardest round on the page, and the one that shows why the earlier rounds exist: every answer here is an assembled word. Hepatosplenomegaly is four parts. Pyelonephritis is three. Neither is on the page, and both can be read cold by anyone who sat through the first two rounds. If you run this with a group, read the question, take the answer, then break the word into its parts on a board or a napkin - people remember the dissection long after they have forgotten the term.
Allow longer than you think and take answers in writing. Spelling matters more in this round than in any other, because the classic near-misses are one letter apart and mean different things: ilium is the flare of the hip bone and ileum the last stretch of small intestine, and a chart that confuses a pair like that sends a patient to the wrong half of the body.
Two of these are eponyms, named after a person rather than built from parts, which is why they have to be learned flat; in both cases the assembled medical name carries information the person's name does not.
Q1.True or false: "death of heart tissue due to loss of blood supply" correctly describes myocardial infarction.Tap to reveal
Answer: True
myo- muscle, cardial heart, and infarct from the Latin infarcire, to stuff or plug - the vessel is blocked and the muscle beyond it dies. In plain English, a heart attack.
Q2.Which progressive brain disease causes loss of cognitive ability and uncontrolled movements called chorea, from the Greek word for dance?Tap to reveal
Answer: Huntington's Disease
Chorea, dance, describes the writhing involuntary movement. The disease is hereditary and dominant, so a child of an affected parent carries a one-in-two chance of inheriting it, and symptoms usually begin in mid-life.
Q3.If a physician tells you that you have presbycusis from the normal process of ageing, what is he likely to suggest you need?Tap to reveal
Answer: A hearing aid
Greek presbys, old man, plus akousis, hearing: the gradual age-related loss of hearing, usually of high frequencies first. The same prefix gives presbyopia, the eye's loss of close focus after about forty.
Q4.Which medical term means "difficulty in swallowing"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Dysphagia
dys- difficult or faulty, plus -phagia, eating. Its neighbours change only the second root: dyspnea is difficult breathing, dysuria difficult urination, dyspepsia difficult digestion. One letter away sits dysphasia, disordered speech.
Q5.Does the condition known as hypoglycemia mean blood sugar levels are too high?Tap to reveal
Answer: No - too low
Break it up: hypo- under, glyc- sugar, -emia in the blood. Hyperglycemia is the high one. This is the prefix pair worth over-learning, because the two states are treated in opposite directions.
Q6.If you have hyperthyroidism, your body is overproducing which hormone?Tap to reveal
Answer: Thyroxine
Thyroxine, or T4, is the thyroid's main output and sets the metabolic rate of cells throughout the body. The tempting wrong answer, thyrocalcitonin, comes from different cells in the same gland and works on calcium instead.
Q7.Which of these most accurately describes the medical term necrosis?Tap to reveal
Answer: Death of living tissue
Greek nekros, corpse. It is death from injury - lost blood supply, infection, a burn - as against apoptosis, the orderly programmed death by which the body retires cells on purpose.
Q8.Among the symptoms of tuberculosis is hemoptysis. What does that term refer to?Tap to reveal
Answer: Coughing up blood
hemo- blood plus -ptysis, spitting. Worth separating from hematemesis, vomiting blood: the ending tells the clinician whether to look at the lungs or the digestive tract.
Q9.Fainting is a brief loss of consciousness caused by temporarily insufficient blood flow to the brain. What is the medical term for it?Tap to reveal
Answer: Syncope
Greek synkope, a cutting short - the same word musicians borrowed for syncopation. The everyday causes are ordinary: standing up too fast, heat, a sudden shock, a long spell without food.
Q10.Cerebral palsy covers a large group of movement disorders. When the two lower limbs are affected, which term is used?Tap to reveal
Answer: Diplegia
The suffix -plegia means paralysis, from Greek plege, a blow. Count with the prefix: di- two, hemi- one side of the body, quadri- or tetra- all four limbs. "Biplegia" is not a word.
Q11.A transient ischemic attack (TIA) is a temporary disturbance of the blood supply to part of the brain. Can a TIA be considered a warning that a stroke is likely?Tap to reveal
Answer: Yes
Read the name: transient, passing; ischemic from ischein, to hold back, and haima, blood - a restricted blood supply. Symptoms usually clear within an hour or two, and the modern definition turns on whether any tissue was permanently damaged rather than on a 24-hour clock. The urgency is in what follows: of the people who go on to have a stroke within three months, about half do so in the first 48 hours.
Q12.Which disease, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, occurs when nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord gradually deteriorate?Tap to reveal
Answer: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Four parts: a- without, myo- muscle, trophic nourishment, and lateral sclerosis, a hardening in the side columns of the spinal cord. It is named for the New York Yankees first baseman who retired in 1939 and died of it in 1941.
Q13.Which condition is characterized by blindness in one half of the visual field of one or both eyes?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hemianopia
hemi- half, an- without, -opia sight. Because the optic nerve fibres cross partway to the brain, which half of the field is lost tells a clinician roughly where the damage lies.
Abbreviations on a chart and a prescription
Twelve questions on the shorthand, which is the part of medical language people actually meet: on a lab slip, on a pharmacy label, in a discharge summary handed over at the door. Most of it is abbreviated Latin, which is why it reads as impenetrable and decodes so easily once you know that os is mouth, die is day and cibum is food.
Run this round as the finisher and let people work in pairs, because two of the questions are translations of a whole line rather than a single term and they play far better as a puzzle than as a fast buzz. Reading a line like "Pt presents 3 d S/P TURP, with c/o HA x 2 d" out loud in full is the single most satisfying moment in the quiz.
One point of honesty, since the notes here assert it. Several of these abbreviations are now formally discouraged in handwritten orders because they are misread as one another, and electronic prescribing has quietly retired more of them by spelling things out; the notes say which, and why. They remain worth knowing because older records are full of them, and knowing why one was retired is better learning than knowing what it meant.
Q1.The doctor says you need a CBC. What is he talking about?Tap to reveal
Answer: A blood test
Complete blood count - red cells, white cells, platelets and hemoglobin in one panel. It is the most commonly ordered blood test there is, which is why it has an abbreviation nobody bothers to expand.
Q2.A prescription says to take the medication PRN. What does PRN mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: As needed
Latin pro re nata, roughly "as the thing arises". The opposite of a scheduled dose: a PRN order leaves the timing to the patient within stated limits, so the label will also give a minimum interval and a daily maximum.
Q3.Before a blood test the lab slip says you must be NPO for 8 hours. What do you have to do?Tap to reveal
Answer: Take nothing by mouth
Latin nil per os. It means no food and usually no water, gum or sweets either - a fasting glucose or lipid panel is measured against an empty stomach, and anesthesia requires one for safety.
Q4.A prescription reads "instill 2-3 gtts in OD bid". What does OD mean here?Tap to reveal
Answer: The right eye
Oculus dexter. OS is oculus sinister, the left eye, and OU is both. Also in that line: gtt is gutta, a drop, and bid is bis in die, twice a day. Safety guidance now prefers "right eye" written out, because these three are so easily swapped.
Q5.Should you eat before taking your medication if the prescription says to take it a.c.?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
a.c. is ante cibum, before meals; p.c. is post cibum, after meals. It appears on drugs whose absorption food interferes with, which is why the instruction is part of the dose rather than a suggestion.
Q6.If the doctor orders an EKG, which part of the body is being examined?Tap to reveal
Answer: The heart
Elektrokardiogramm - the K is German, the language the term was first published in. Willem Einthoven, a Dutch physiologist in Leiden, built the first practical string-galvanometer recorder and took the 1924 Nobel Prize for it. ECG is the same test with the English spelling, and an EEG - one letter different - records the brain instead.
Q7.If the doctor writes "NSR" on your electrocardiogram, what has he found?Tap to reveal
Answer: That your heart rhythm is normal
Normal sinus rhythm - the beat is starting where it should, in the sinoatrial node, and arriving at a normal rate. It is good news about the rhythm and about nothing else: a tracing can read NSR while the rest of the same ECG is abnormal.
Q8.If the nurse writes "NKDA" on your chart, what does it mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: You said you are not allergic to any medications
No known drug allergies. Its neighbours in the same shorthand: WNL, within normal limits; NAD, no acute distress; and DNKA, did not keep appointment, which is about the appointment rather than the patient.
Q9.In medical terms, what is a CVA?Tap to reveal
Answer: A stroke
Cerebrovascular accident. Many clinicians now write "stroke" instead, on the grounds that nothing about it is accidental. Do not confuse it with MI, myocardial infarction, which is the heart.
Q10.What do the abbreviations Rx, Tx, Hx and Sx mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Prescription, treatment, history and symptom
The x simply stands in for the rest of the word, which is why the family keeps growing: Dx diagnosis, Fx fracture, Px prognosis. Rx itself is the Latin recipe, "take", and the slash through the R is what is left of a medieval abbreviation mark.
Q11.A chart reads "Pt presents 3 d S/P TURP, with c/o HA x 2 d". What will the doctor conclude?Tap to reveal
Answer: The patient has a headache
Translated: the patient presents three days status post transurethral resection of the prostate, complaining of headache for two days. S/P is status post, after; c/o is complains of; x marks a duration.
Q12.How many days would 30 tablets last if the prescription says "take 1 Tab PO TID"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ten days
PO is per os, by mouth, and TID is ter in die, three times a day. Three a day into thirty tablets is ten days - the arithmetic a pharmacy technician does on every label, and the reason a quantity and a frequency always have to be read together.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to run 58 medical terminology questions?
About fifty minutes to an hour for the whole page, reading each question twice and allowing fifteen seconds. With half an hour, run the roots round and the abbreviations round in full and skip the middle: those two bracket the subject, easy at one end and practical at the other.
Is this the right level for a nursing or medical assistant student?
It fits a first-term terminology unit and a review before a certification exam. The roots and prefix rounds cover what is examined most; the conditions round is harder than a typical first-term quiz and is a good gauge of whether the word-part method has actually stuck. It is not a substitute for a coding or pharmacology course, which go much deeper into abbreviations and dosage.
Why do so many terms have both a Greek and a Latin root for the same thing?
Because the vocabulary arrived in two waves. Greek came first through Hippocratic and Galenic medicine, Latin came with the anatomists of the Renaissance and remained the language of anatomy. The working convention is that Greek roots build disease and surgery words while Latin ones supply plain anatomical names - hence dermatitis and dermatology beside the plain cutaneous, and mastectomy beside the mammary gland.
What is the fastest way to learn medical terminology?
Learn parts, not words. A few hundred roots, about fifty prefixes and about fifty suffixes assemble most of the vocabulary, so drilling those lets you read a term you have never seen. Practice by dissecting: split every new word at the joins, name each piece, then reassemble the meaning. Guessing from an English word that sounds similar is the habit that produces wrong answers.
Are the abbreviations in the last round still used?
Most are, daily. A few are formally discouraged in writing because they are misread for one another - the two eye abbreviations among them, along with U for unit, which becomes a zero, and cc for cubic centimeter, which becomes a u. Electronic prescribing has retired others by simply spelling things out. They still have to be recognized, since older charts and records are full of them.
Can I print these questions and answers?
Yes. Two buttons at the top of the page print it: one gives a blank question sheet to hand out, the other the same sheet with the answer key. The explanatory notes stay on the page rather than on the printout, which is what keeps a 58-question handout down to a few sheets of paper. It is free and there is no account.
