why is it called an orthodontist and not an orthodentist?

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They both do teeth things, would have expected the names to match.

In: Biology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Dentist came first, from French and ultimately a Latin derivation. It’s worth nothing that pulling people’s teeth out is a very old profession so it made sense to come up with a word for it along time ago. So ‘dentist’ is kind of common place word that originated naturally from everyday language for an everyday profession.

The modern medical idea of trained doctors who do specialist work in your mouthal region is a modern concept and so new words were created to describe these new doctors. For no better reason than “history is weird” the guy who started making up these new words took the *Greek* derivation for his new words and so he used “odont” in his words.

So A. it’s worth nothing that’s “o-dont” vs “dent” not just “dont” vs. “dent and B. both odont and dent come from the same much older root word from P.I.E.

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