“So, do you have any questions?” the man in the white smock asked as he filled up his syringe and eagerly eyed my gums.
Yes, I said. Why does the guy I see on a regular basis for my dental work get called a “dentist” while all you specialists — like endodontists, orthodontists, periodontists, prosthodontists and the like — get called “dontist”? Shouldn’t I start calling him a “dontist” instead of a “dentist”?
The man in the smock looked thoroughly perplexed.
“Well … ” he stalled. “You know, no one has ever asked me that. I have no idea.”
Don’t give it another thought, I replied, suddenly realizing the impending root canal procedure could be comfortable or uncomfortable, depending on how distracted the endodontist might be. I didn’t want to further distract him.
But I still wondered about the nomenclature, so I asked my dentist about it when I saw him for a followup visit.
“You know, I never thought about it,” he said when I posed the same question. “I’ve never heard anyone give a real reason.”
I suspect neither gentleman much cared if the subject ever arose again, but I persevered.
Standard reference books were no help. Various word-combination searches on the Internet didn’t come up with much either. I even dashed off a note to the American Dental Association posing the question. When, or if, that will be answered remains a mystery to date.
I do know that the word “dont” means tooth, but that doesn’t explain the origin of the word “dent” in the general dentist sense, so the confusion remained.
The Online Etymology Dictionary tells me that “dentist” popped up around A.D. 1759 and comes from the French dentiste and the Latin dens (gen. dentis), both meaning “tooth.” Interesting stuff, but there is no citation for the word — if, indeed it is a standalone word rather than just a suffix, “dontist” in said reference source.
So, I went about it by searching for “dent.” That, I was told by the OED (the online one, not the revered Oxford English Dictionary which charges a minimum $295 a year, which I don’t have, for an online subscription), came into use around A.D. 1325 to mean “a strike or blow,” and the first use of the word to explain a sense of “indentation” was first recorded in A.D. 1565.
All very interesting, but still not explaining why “dentist” and/or “dontist.” I began to get dizzy. I wondered if an Irish family named O’Dontal had a son and named him Perry would he be forced to go into specialized dentistry?
Then I stumbled upon an online source called the Dictionary of Words. It occured to me that was a good thing for a dictionary to be. About “dontal” it said:
[1] : The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
odontalgia \o`dontal”gia\, n. nl., fr. gr. ?; ‘odoy`s,
‘odo`ntos, a tooth + ‘a`lgos pain. med. toothache.
1913 webster
[2] : WordNet (r) 2.0
odontalgia
n : an ache localized in or around a tooth syn: toothache.
I could go on, but by now I’m sure I’ve created more numb heads than a heavy shot of novocain. What it boils down to, pending a response from the American Dental Association (see above), is that there are more reasons for “dontist” than “dentist,” but no one using either term knows why they do it.
I suppose that’s not particularly out of step with so many things we come across in life.
Stay tuned. I suspect I’ll return to this topic. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
