Pediatrician

How to spell pediatrician

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce pediatrician

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pediatrician mean?

1. nounA doctor who specialises in the medical care of infants and children.

Pediatrician in a sentence

• The pediatrician checked the baby's weight at the routine visit.

• New parents often keep their pediatrician on speed dial for the first year.

Where does pediatrician come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek roots: pais (genitive paidos), meaning 'child', and iatros, meaning 'healer' or 'physician'. The combining element iatros also gives us 'psychiatry' and 'geriatric', so once you spot the -iatr- spine you can recognise a whole family of medical words. 'Pediatrics' as a formal branch of medicine took shape in the nineteenth century, and 'pediatrician' for the doctor who specialises in the care of children followed soon after, becoming common in English by the late 1800s. The American spelling drops the original Greek diphthong, writing 'ped-' where the British form keeps 'paed-' (paediatrician), preserving the 'ae' that mirrors the Greek 'ai' in paidos. The 'ped-' here is unrelated to the Latin pes, pedis ('foot') that lurks in 'pedal' and 'pedestrian', a coincidence of spelling that occasionally trips people up. The tidy way to remember the ending is that, like 'physician', 'technician' and 'musician', the practitioner suffix is spelled -ician.

How the word is built

• pedi- (from Greek pais, paidos: child)
• iatr (from iatros: healer, physician)
• -ician (one who practises)

British and American spelling

Pediatrician is the American spelling. British English spells it paediatrician.