Thesaurus of Medical Word Roots

RR 2014/227 Thesaurus of Medical Word Roots Horace Gerald Danner Scarecrow Press Lanham, MD and Plymouth 2013 xiii+630 pp. ISBN 978 0 8108 9154 8 (print); ISBN 978 0 8108 9155 5 (e-book) £75 $120

Keywords Dictionaries, Health and medicine. Language

Review DOI 10.1108/RR-04-2014-0100

There is something about word origins that seems to make the meaning of a word take hold in the memory and imagination. Digging down into the primal root of language can feel like discovering some kind of a secret truth. Librarians should be familiar with the visitor who will not be satisfied with a definition that does not include some explanation of how a word came to have its meaning; they are the reason that we have etymological dictionaries.

Unfortunately, many of the medical dictionaries available through online reference databases do not provide information on word origins. This includes familiar titles like The American Heritage Medical Dictionary, Black's Medical Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Medical Desk Dictionary. Western medical education is intertwined with Greek and Latin terminology. Many preferred technical...