The road to success in any health career begins with a solid understanding of medical terminology. Medical terminology truly is the language of medicine. As a medical scribe, understanding medical terms, abbreviations and acronyms is crucial to your job. This lesson will introduce you to the elements that make up most medical terms so that you can quickly build a medical vocabulary. Those elements are root words, suffixes and prefixes, which fit together like a puzzle to form the terms. Don’t let any of this overwhelm you, though. Like learning a new language, the more you use medical terminology, the more comfortable you’ll become.