The third declension is the largest and trickiest in medical Latin. In this section, we will analyze masculine nouns, their characteristic endings in the nominative and genitive cases, and the basic rules for determining gender.
Names of muscles according to their function hold a special place in anatomical terminology. You will learn to construct terms like musculus flexor, levator, and supinator, and understand the logic behind their agreement with nouns and adjectives.
During classes and credit tests, instructors most frequently ask for the dictionary forms of exception words and request translations of multi-component muscle names (e.g., musculus levator labii superioris). Understanding the structure of these terms now will save you dozens of hours of rote memorization in normal and topographical anatomy courses.