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A complete introductory medical terminology course for a learner who knows no medical vocabulary yet. Unit 1 teaches how terms are built: the roots and combining forms, prefixes and suffixes (about 200 word-part groups from the OpenRN textbook), the rules for joining and taking a term apart, Greek and Latin plurals, and the abbreviations that are unsafe to write in a chart. Units 2 through 17 then walk through the body one system at a time (whole body and positions, skin, skeleton, muscle, nervous system, eye and ear, endocrine, heart and vessels, blood, lymphatic and immune, respiratory, digestive, urinary, male and female reproductive with obstetrics, and finally oncology and mental health). Each system teaches its own roots, then anatomy and physiology, diseases and disorders, and tests and procedures, with the common abbreviations built in. The two shapes that carry the course are part to meaning (cardi/o is heart) and build or deconstruct (gastritis is gastr/itis, inflammation of the stomach), and a term is never used before its parts have been taught. The cards are text only: there are no pronunciation guides and no diagrams.
Copied straight from the course. In the app, each wrong option also gets its own explanation.
Card 1Which prefix means between?
inter-. Inter- means between. Intra- (within), infra- (below) and intro- (into) are the look-alikes.
Card 2Which term means a bluish discoloration of the skin?
Cyanosis. Cyan/o means blue, and -osis means abnormal condition, so cyanosis is a blue color.
Card 3Which test uses ultrasound to show the structure and valves of the heart?
echocardiogram. An echocardiogram uses sound waves (ech/o) to image the heart.
Yes. Create a free Encodr account and all 17 units and 1,395 cards are yours to study, with spaced repetition scheduling your reviews.
No. The course assumes no medical vocabulary. Unit 1 teaches how terms are built from word parts before any body system appears, and every system unit teaches its own roots before it uses terms built from them.
Unit 1 gives a direct card to each of the roughly 200 word-part groups in the OpenRN textbook (about 240 individual forms), and the system units add the high-yield roots specific to each body system. Every other part appears inside the term cards that use it. There is no single official count of word parts, so this is the count from the source textbook, not a rule.
Whole body terminology and positions, integumentary, skeletal, muscular, nervous, eye and ear, endocrine, cardiovascular, blood, lymphatic and immune, respiratory, digestive, urinary, male reproductive, female reproductive with obstetrics, and a closing unit on oncology and mental health.
No. Cards are text only, with no audio, pronunciation guides or diagrams, so pair it with a spoken glossary if you need to say the terms aloud.
The OpenRN Medical Terminology 2e textbook and eCampusOntario Building a Medical Terminology Foundation 2e (oncology and mental health), both CC BY 4.0, plus the Joint Commission Do Not Use list and the ISMP error-prone abbreviations list for unit 1. The cards are rewritten, not copied.