Medical Terminology Flashcards: 67 Prefixes, Suffixes & Roots

Medical Terminology Flashcards: 67 Prefixes, Suffixes & Roots

Study 67 medical word-part → English meaning mappings from the U.S. National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus Understanding Medical Words tutorial. This beginner deck teaches terminology only and is not medical advice.

What is included

• 37 root and body-part mapping groups plus 30 beginning and ending mapping groups taught in the tutorial's finite Word Roots and Beginnings and Endings sections.
• One ordinary basic card per mapping group. The front is the shortest unambiguous word-part cue, with true source-listed spelling variants grouped on one card. The back begins with the English meaning.
• The single tag medical-word-parts on every card.

How recall works

Every card practices one direction: medical word part → English meaning. Meaning → word-part reverse cards are excluded because multiple roots or affixes can share a meaning, so a reverse cue is often ambiguous. Term-construction and composite prompts are excluded because assembling a medical term is a different skill from recalling one word part. Abbreviations and full medical-term definitions are also excluded so each review has one clear target.

Learning order

The first seven cards establish familiar roots for bone, heart, nerves, skin, stomach, brain, and kidney. The remaining 60 cards alternate roots with beginnings or endings. Opposite size, level, and speed pairs are separated by 16 cards; related procedure endings and specialist endings are also spaced apart. Closely related anatomy roots are distributed across the sequence rather than placed in body-system runs, and no adjacent cards are synonymous, opposites, or an exact word-part combination used by the tutorial's examples. The order is fixed and deterministic.

Related study guides

• Medical terminology flashcards
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• How to use flashcards for anatomy
• How to make better flashcards
• How to study a premade Anki deck

Sources and license

The mapping inventory and every answer were checked against the National Library of Medicine's Understanding Medical Words tutorial, including its Word Roots and Beginnings and Endings sections. MedlinePlus Appendix A was used as the broader word-parts reference, but entries not taught in the finite tutorial were excluded. The source review was completed on August 16, 2026.

Source facts are acknowledged rather than relicensed. The organization, wording, metadata, description, and generated cover artwork are original and dedicated under CC0 1.0 Universal. This independent study deck is not affiliated with or endorsed by the National Library of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health, or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.