Medics

How to spell medics

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce medics

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does medics mean?

1. nounPeople trained to provide medical treatment, especially paramedics, ambulance crews, or military medical staff.

Medics in a sentence

• The medics arrived within minutes of the crash and stabilised the driver.

• Army medics treated the wounded soldiers under heavy fire.

Where does medics come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin medicus, meaning 'physician' or 'doctor', which was itself built on the verb mederi, 'to heal' or 'to look after'. That same healing root lies behind a whole family of English words, including 'medicine', 'medical', and 'remedy', so the shared 'med' spelling is a useful anchor. The singular 'medic' was used in English from the seventeenth century in scholarly contexts, but the familiar modern sense surged in the twentieth century with military slang, where a 'medic' was the soldier trained to treat the wounded in the field. From there it spread into everyday speech to cover paramedics, ambulance crews, and informally medical students or doctors. The plural simply adds -s, and because the root ends in a hard 'c', no 'k' is inserted before the ending, which is the small point writers occasionally second-guess.

How the word is built

• medic (from Latin medicus: physician, healer)
• -s (plural)