Dental

How to spell dental

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dental

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dental mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the teeth or to the care and treatment of teeth.

Dental in a sentence

• The company offers free dental insurance to all staff.

• Regular dental check-ups can prevent expensive problems later.

Where does dental come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin dens, with the stem dentis, meaning simply 'tooth'. The adjective dentalis grew from that root to mean 'belonging to the teeth', and it entered English in the early 1600s by way of French dental. The very same dens root sits inside a whole family of familiar words: 'dentist', 'dentures', 'dent' (originally a tooth-like notch), and even 'indent', which once meant to cut a zig-zag edge like a row of teeth. In linguistics the term was borrowed to describe sounds made with the tongue against the teeth, such as 'th'. The plain spelling rarely traps writers, since 'dent' is a complete everyday word and the '-al' suffix is the same one found in 'mental' and 'rental'.

How the word is built

• dent- (from Latin dens, dentis: tooth)
• -al (adjective suffix: relating to)