Dental terminology

Why this matters

Every lesson in dental anatomy is written in this vocabulary, and so is every chart and referral you will read. It is also the vocabulary of the commonest wrong-site surgical error in NHS England data: 189 wrong tooth or teeth extractions in England across the five years April 2015 to March 2020, about 38 a year. The category left the NHS England Never Event list on 1 April 2021 and is no longer counted there, but it remains a reportable patient safety incident. Notation is the medium of the commonest named cause of those events, miscommunication.

The big picture

Two vocabularies, one mouth. The first names WHICH tooth - three competing notations, only one of them an international standard, and a documented safety problem where they meet. The second names WHERE ON a tooth - surfaces, the angles built from them, and the ridges, fossae, grooves, cusps and roots that Black abstracted from a cube in 1902.

The 15 cards in this lesson

1. 01Four documents own dental vocabulary, and they contradict each other
2. 02The first FDI digit carries the quadrant AND the dentition
3. 03Three notations that start counting in three different places
4. 04In one quadrant only, Palmer and Universal letters are exactly reversed
5. 05Clinical alert — in the lesson
6. 06Five surfaces, and the international standard calls none of them facial
7. 07Mesial follows the curve of the arch, not the front of the face
8. 08Black's cube: a line angle is two surfaces, a point angle is three
9. 09Clinical alert — in the lesson
10. 10Almost every anterior crown landmark sits on one lingual surface
11. 11A groove is a landmark; a fissure is a defect in the enamel
12. 12Six named ridges, and two of them join to make a third
13. 13Cusps are named from the line angles they stand on
14. 14Roots are named and divided by the same rules as crowns
15. 15Teeth touch over an area, and four embrasures open around it

You have got it when

You can: (1) read an FDI/ISO code and say what each digit means; (2) convert between FDI, Universal and UK alphanumeric, and say why conversion is not enough; (3) name the quadrant where Palmer and Universal letters collide, and the safe letter; (4) name the five surfaces in Terminologia Anatomica's terms and say why the surface letters are ADA codes, not international; (5) derive line and point angles rather than…