Pylimitics

Here’s an oddity that I’m sure has been bugging you for ages: why is a regular tooth doctor called a dentist, while a specialist tooth doctor is called a dontist, as in “periodontist” or “orthodontist?” This is your lucky day, because you’re about to find out!

The “dent” in dentist and the “dont” in “-odontist” come from the same root word, “ədent-,” which was the Proto-Indo-European for “biting.” It was the source of the Latin word for tooth, “dent-.” Then around the 1700s the word “dentist” arrived in English from French, where it was “dentiste.” Aha, you point out, people had toothaches before the 1700s, so what did they call the person who fixed them? Remember that pretty much the only cure for a toothache back then was to extract the problematic tooth. Thus what we would call a “dentist” today was, apparently for centuries, simply called a “tooth-drawer.” That term appears as early as 1393 in Piers Plowman. The first citation for “dentist” in the OED mentions “tooth-drawer” too:

“Dentist figures it now in our newspapers, and may do well enough for a French puffer; but we fancy Rutter is content with being called a tooth-drawer.” 
(From the Sept. 15, 1759 issue of the Edinburgh Chronicle.)

So much for “dentist.” But what about “-odontists?” Those terms are newer than dentist, and appeared in 1820 in John Mason Good’s book A Physiological System of Nosology” (“nosology” is the classification of diseases). In the book, Good coins the word “odontia” to mean “pain or derangement of teeth or their sockets.” 

But where did he come up with “odontia”? Well, remember that Proto-Indo-European root word “ədent-” that was the source of the Latin word for tooth? Well, it was also the source of the Greek word for tooth, which was “odont.” At the time his book was published, “dentist” was already an established term, so Good was probably just trying to put some distance between that word and the new word he needed for his classifications. Over the next century or so, the dental specialties based on Good’s “odontia” began to appear. “Orthodontia” showed up in 1849 and “orthodontist” in 1903. “Periodontia” appeared in 1914, followed by “periodontist” in 1920 and “periodontics” in 1948. And finally “endodontia,” “endodontics” and “endodontist” all appeared in 1946.

Another question, of course, is why dentists weren’t called “odontists” after Good’s book was published. They were, at least occasionally. Blackwood’s Magazine was a publication in the early 1800s in the UK, and someone named John Gibson Lockhart published several pieces there using the term “odontist.” Lockhart’s work was mostly humorous (or, given his location, humourous), but he had created a character, “James Scott,” that was based on a real-life dentist. Apparently the real one — John Scott —was something of a superfan of Lockhart’s work and started publishing his own work under the alias The Odontist. Hopefully he was a better dentist than he was a writer, though, because “odontist” never really caught on. And so to this day we’re still visiting both dentists and various -odontists.