DECODING DOCTORS

Check Out These 10 Medical Terms Explained!

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Have you ever had a doctor explain that you "suffer from otitis" to simply mean you have an ear inflammation? The terminology used by doctors can be very confusing to patients, as medical words are full of roots, prefixes, and suffixes that come from Greek or Latin. If you want to understand your doctor better during your next visit, or just show off your lexicon to your friends, read on! Today, we are reviewing and explaining what these 10 aspects of medical terminology mean.

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"Hypo-" is a prefix that comes from Greek, meaning "under" or "below."

In medicine, this term is used to refer to low levels or deficient functioning.

For example, you may see this prefix in "Hypoglycemia" (low blood sugar) or "Hypotension" (low blood pressure). To refer to an organ or gland that is below its normal function, we have the word "Hypothyroidism" as an example, which indicates an underactive thyroid gland.

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"Hyper-" is the opposite of the previous prefix. Hyper- also comes from Greek, meaning "excessive" or "above normal."

This prefix is used when levels, functioning, or certain conditions are elevated or above values considered normal. For example, "Hyperthermia" refers to elevated body temperature. "Hypertension" is blood pressure that exceeds the values indicated as healthy. Finally, "Hyperthyroidism" is the overactivity of the thyroid gland, which leads to the overproduction of thyroid hormones.

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"-itis" is one of the best-known suffixes in medicine. Greek is again the language of origin here, this time meaning "inflammation."

Doctors often add this suffix to the scientific name of a body part to indicate it is swollen. As already mentioned, "Otitis" is the inflammation of the ear, as frequent as it is painful. "Appendicitis" indicates inflammation of the appendix, often resulting in surgery to remove it. Another example is "Bronchitis," which refers to inflammation of the bronchial tubes.

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"Gastro-" is a prefix that, rather than referring to a condition, injury, or disease, indicates a specific body part where all those things can occur.

Gastro- comes from Greek and means "stomach" or "tummy." Therefore, this term refers to conditions, procedures, or tests that affect or are performed on the stomach or gastrointestinal tract.

For example -using one of the suffixes already mentioned above- we have the term "Gastritis," the inflammation of the stomach, which causes so much pain. "Gastroenterology," on the other hand, is the general study of the stomach and gastrointestinal tract.

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"-osis" is a suffix that comes to indicate that something is not working as it should or was affected in some way.

Coming from Greek, "-osis" can mean "condition," "disease," or "abnormal."

For example, we can cite "Fibrosis," the formation of excess fibrous connective tissue, which can occur in some scars. On the other hand, "Thrombosis" is a well-known term indicating the presence of a blood clot (thrombus) within a blood vessel.

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Like "Gastro-," "Osteo-" indicates a specific part or area of the human body.

This prefix comes from the Greek osteon meaning "bone." Thus, any medical term that includes this prefix indicates a condition, disease, procedure, or treatment that affects or is applied to the bones.

For example, "Osteoporosis" combines this prefix with the familiar "-osis" suffix, indicating a condition characterized by porous and fragile bones. On the other hand, "Osteotomy" refers to a surgical procedure on a bone.

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The Greek skopein, meaning "to look" or "to examine," gives rise to the medical suffix "-scopy."

Following its word of origin, the suffix "-scopy" doesn't refer to a disease or body part but to an examination or viewing of some organ or function.

To give some examples, we can mention the well-known "Endoscopy," a procedure through which an internal part of the body is examined using a flexible tube with a lamp and camera attached. "Bronchoscopy," on the other hand, indicates the examination of bronchi.

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Originating from the Greek haima, any medical word that includes the prefix "Hemat-" refers to something related to blood.

"Hematology," for example, is the science that studies the blood, its functions, its elements, and the conditions or diseases that can affect it. "Hematoma" is a bit of blood that collects in a certain spot because it has escaped from blood vessels, commonly known as a bruise. "Hematopoiesis," on its part, refers to the process by which new blood cells are formed.

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We have to admit we've left a few spoilers, as the suffix "-ology" was mentioned before. But let's take a better look at it.

Coming from the Greek logos ("study" or "reason"), "-ology" applies to different medical fields dedicated to studying specific parts or functions of our body.

One of the best known, "Cardiology," is the study and care of the heart and related conditions. Another example is the word "Dermatology," the area of medicine that studies and treats the skin.

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The suffix "-ectomy" indicates a surgical procedure. Coming from the Greek ektomē, meaning "a cutting out" or "excision," practices ending with this suffix are performed to remove a specific body part.

While that sounds a bit strong, these types of surgeries are actually very common, and many of them are performed quickly. "Appendectomy," for example, involves the surgical removal of an infected appendix. There are other examples, such as "Mastectomy," which is the surgical removal of breast tissue.

The universal language

From "mama" to "banana": Words that are understood in every language

Learning languages is hard. But, fortunately, some terms rooted in daily universal experiences don't change much when crossing borders. If you say "mama, "papa," "taxi," or "banana," anywhere in the world, they’ll recognize those nouns immediately —even if the context provided is entirely blurry. The question is: Why did these words barely change over time and across different languages? Let’s explore the stories behind the most spoken words on the planet.

"OK" is the most spoken word on the planet. And it started as a typo joke. In 1839, the initials "O.K." were first published in the Boston Morning Post, meant as an abbreviation for "oll korrect" — a popular slang misspelling of "all correct."

Following that gag, politics intervened. In 1840, President Martin Van Buren's reelection supporters formed "O.K. Clubs" across the country, since Van Buren was nicknamed "Old Kinderhook" after his hometown in upstate New York. From there, telegraphs carried it coast to coast, and eventually it spread from North America all the way to the Moon, where Buzz Aldrin spoke it after the Apollo 11 landing.

Is it a real word? According to science, it is. In 2013, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics investigated "huh?" in naturally occurring conversations across ten languages and presented evidence for two claims. One, the term is universal. Two, it is genuinely a word.

They later expanded the study to 31 spoken languages from around the world and found that all of them have a word with a nearly identical sound and function as the English "huh?" With all its nuances and differences, most human languages on Earth independently arrived at similar rising syllables for not understanding something in conversation.

Why do unrelated languages, spoken by people who never met, use almost identical words for "mother" and "father"? In Swahili: mama. In Polish: mama. In Mandarin Chinese: māma. In Quechua, spoken in the Andes of South America: mama. This mystery puzzled linguists for generations.

This isn’t a case of cognates (words borrowed from one language to another). The answer here lies in babies: "mama" and "papa" are among the easiest sounds to produce, because they combine bilabial consonants and open vowels. "Mmm" is often the first consonant babies experiment with.

The term "hello" had floated around English since the 1820s, mainly as a shout to get someone’s attention, like "hey" or "oi." But it was barely more than that before telephones existed.

Then, in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and it was time to decide what callers should say when they picked up. Bell himself suggested the traditional nautical hail, "Ahoy." It was Thomas Edison who suggested "Hello!" in a letter dated 1877. By 1889, telephone operators had become widely known as "hello-girls." By then, the greeting had jumped to everyday conversation, and eventually every language on Earth picked up a version of it.

It is said that "Coca-Cola" is one of the most recognizable terms on the entire planet, much like the word "OK." This makes sense: the soft drink is sold in more than 200 countries. The name wasn’t the result of a marketing team or a focus group. It was coined in 1886 by the company’s bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, who derived it from the drink's two original ingredients: coca leaf and kola nut.

The drink was invented in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1886 by Dr. John S. Pemberton, who originally marketed it as a medicinal tonic. Today, approximately 1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola beverages are consumed each day, so wherever in the world you are, the brand needs absolutely no introduction.

The word "coffee" has traveled far. Its story starts in the Ethiopian highlands with a by-now popular legend that depicts a 9th-century goat herder who noticed his goats wouldn’t sleep after eating berries from a certain bush. Thus, the idea of the drink made from those berries spread in Ethiopia.

From there, it moved to Yemen, where it was documented in a 15th-century text as a drink made from roasted coffee beans. It was assigned the Arabic word qahwa, which traveled with the drink. The product was traded by the Ottomans, who influenced several other languages, and from it derived the Italian caffè, the Dutch koffie, and the French café. So, the term has mutated slightly in each language, but it remains similar enough to identify it easily all over the world.

Every night, hundreds of millions of people all over the world put on a Persian garment with a Persian name. The word "pajamas" comes from the Persian pay-jāma, a compound of pay (foot or leg) and jāma (garment). In 15th-century Persia, it referred to loose trousers worn by men and women for comfort, and the term entered English in the 18th century when British colonists encountered the garment in India.

But the original pajamas were not sleepwear for a long time. Victorian high society adopted them as fashionable, exotic loungewear, and it was by the early 20th century that the two-piece sleeping suit had spread across the Western world. Today, most countries in the world have very similar names for this garment.

"Safari" is the name for a very specific activity. For many tongues in the world, the word itself conjures jeeps, binoculars, lions, and zebras.

But its original meaning was distant from the current one. It comes from the Arabic safara, which means "to travel." In Swahili, safari simply means any kind of journey, not just a wildlife expedition. For the English language, it was first recorded by explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1859. British colonists in East Africa understood the word to apply to hunting expeditions, and, by the middle of the 20th century, Hollywood had cemented its modern image with films romanticizing the African bush.

Today, Apple’s decision to name its search engine "Safari" brings the term closer to its original meaning than to the one related to wildlife exploration.

Banana is one of the most consumed fruits on Earth, and its name has traveled with it. The word "banana" first appeared in English in the 1590s, borrowed by Spanish or Portuguese explorers from a West African word, possibly from the Wolof language, spoken in what is today Senegal and Gambia.

Most historians sustain that Africans began harvesting the fruit at least 4,500 years ago. When Portuguese and Spanish ships began trading across the world in the 15th and 16th centuries, they encountered the fruit, borrowed its African name, and carried both across the Atlantic. Today, the word sounds remarkably similar in many languages: banana in English, Spanish, Italian, and German; banane in French; 바나나 (banana) in Korean.

From Buenos Aires to Bangkok, you can step off a plane having never spoken a word of the local language, hold out your hand, and say one word: "Taxi." You will get the exact same thing. But the story of this two-syllable word is a tangle of countries and languages.

The original word was "taximeter," coined by German inventor Friedrich W. G. Bruhn in 1891. This was a device that measured the fare by distance. It was the French who shortened taximètre to taxi. A company imported them to New York under the market name "Taxicab" and decided to paint them yellow, since it was the most visible color. From there, both the short name and the iconic color stuck. Today, it is a symbol universally shared that you’ll find in every major city.