Medical terminology and its particularities

Abstract

Nowadays a lot of job offers in the foreign countries more often need the requirements of adequate foreign language professional communication. Highly specialized job positions re-quire the mastery of professional language and the associated professional terminology as well, which is necessary for professional communication in the specific field of work. This is also true in the medical field, where the mastery of professional medical terminology should be the most preciseness. Medical terminology is constantly developing, completing and en-hancing as the result of scientific research advance and use of new approaches, methods and the appearance of new diseases and syndromes. There are currently about 170, 000 medical terms. These include drug names, names or identifications of body parts, organs and parts of the organs, the names of body functions, the names of diseases, examinations, operational methods and interventions. The active medical vocabulary should contain at least 6,000 to 8,000 terms. Furthermore, each medical subdiscipline forms its own terminology all the time, but the experts from related fields do not often understand it. In our paper we focus on a brief history of medical terminology, its development, current medical terminology and some particularities of the German medical terminology.