Edentia

Quick, can anyone guess what that word means? (no cheating!!!)

Before I give you the definition, I am going to tell you the story behind it.

On Friday during Clinical Orientation, one of our dogs was missing a tooth. The dog happened to be one of the doctor's dogs and she asked us if we had noticed during our physical exam. None of us had (but in our defense, its a really obscure missing tooth and short of counting all of the teeth on top and bottom-which the dog would not have liked-we would not have caught it). After she pointed it out to us, one of my friends asked her if there was a term for missing tooth and what it was. She laughed and told us that she was 100% certain that there was a term for it but had no idea what it was (something about her being a veterinary internist and not a veterinary dentist was thrown out there haha).

I went home and forgot about the term until much later when I was studying. Then I of course had to find out the answer (curiosity is a very god trait for a veterinarian by the way). After some extensive searching, I found out that in our veterinary dictionary, edentia means the absence of teeth, edentulous means without teeth, and edentate means an animal without teeth but is more commonly referred to in terms of the animal order Edentata which includes anteaters and sloths. (if you didn't learn anything today, no worries, I just made your quota : D )

So now you're thinking, if this happened Friday, why are you posting about it on Sunday? The answer to that is that the word is sitting on a post-it note on my wall and I randomly started thinking about it. In order for the word to truly mean absence of or without, it really should begin with a- or an- since that's what latin roots tell us. Basically, I am just moderately annoyed that the creator of this word chose an e- in stead of an a- because of the 100,000 terms I will need to know and remember, it is substantially less helpful when they do not follow rules. And yes I checked, there is no adentia in the dictionary :-p.