American Review of Respiratory Medicine - Volumen 24, Número 2 - June 2024

Letters to the Editor

Panhispanic Dictionary of Medical Terms

OnMay 16, the Diccionario Panhispánico de Términos Médicos (Panhispanic Dictionary of Medical Terms, DPTM for its acronym in Spanish) was presented at the National Academy of Medicine with the presence of representatives from the Royal Academy of Medicine of Spain.

TheDPTM is the world’s first dictionary to record the homogeneity and heterogeneity of medical language and is intended for the estimated 500 million Spanish speakers currently existing worldwide.

Theinitiative for this monumental work came from the Royal Academy of Medicine of Spain (RANME, for its acronym in Spanish), which in September 2012 signed an agreement in Madrid with the Acad­emies of Medicine of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Thisdictionary is sponsored by the Latin American Association of National Academies of Medicine, Spain, and Portugal (ALANAM, for its acronym in Spanish).

Throughnearly ten years of uninterrupted work and with the advice of prestigious specialists from various biomedical disciplines, the dictionary was presented in Madrid in November 2023.

Overthese nine years of work, 80,000 medical terms have been incorporated, including the languages and idioms used in the fifteen participating countries. For each medical term, the dictionary provides the definition, the regional denomination from Spanish-speaking countries, the English translation of the term, and the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) and SNOMED-CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms) codes.

In times like these when English has become the language of international scientific exchange, the dictionary allows users to know the Spanish term for neologisms frequently used in scientific writing, thereby avoiding the incorporation of terms that do not reflect the richness of our language.

Thedictionary is a free and open access work in which translators, computer scientists, etymologists, lexicographers, and coding specialists have participated, apart from the already mentioned academies.

Youcan access the dictionary, which has a simple and user-friendly graphical interface, for free through the website of the National Academy of Medicine: www.anm.edu.ar, or via the QR code at the bottom of this article.