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Medical Terminology: Roots, Prefixes, Suffixes
Take apart a medical word you have never been taught, and build the term from what happened: hepatomegaly, leukopenia, cholecystectomy. For a first-semester nursing, pre-med or allied-health student who knows no Greek. Ninety-six cards teach about 120 roots, prefixes and suffixes before the body systems that use them, then quadrants, positions, plurals and chart abbreviations; it stops at the word, with no pathology or drugs.
Two words off the same chart: appendicitis and tonsillitis. Say what the ending they share tells you about the organ.
It is inflamed
— Red, hot, swollen — the reason the appendix ends up in a specimen jar.
Source
-itis is the highest-yield ending in the language: appendicitis, tonsillitis, dermatitis, hepatitis, gastritis, bronchitis. It names inflammation and nothing else — not the cause, not the treatment. That is why a chart can carry an -itis word on day one, before anyone knows whether the cause is infection, injury or an autoimmune process. Read the ending first and you already know what kind of word you are holding.