enter/o means intestines, especially the small intestine (from the Greek word enteron).
What does enter/o mean?
Enter/o is a combining form (a word root) used in medical terms to mean the intestines, and especially the small intestine. It comes from the Greek word enteron, meaning intestine or gut. When you see enter/o in a medical term, it is almost always pointing to the intestines.
As a medical term building block, enter/o joins with other roots, prefixes, and suffixes to form many words. For example, enteritis means inflammation of the intestine, gastroenteritis means inflammation of the stomach and intestines, and enteropathy means any disease of the intestine. Once you know that enter/o means intestine, you can work out the meaning of these longer words by looking at their other parts.
It is worth noting that enter/o is a root (a combining form), not a prefix. It usually sits at or near the start of a word, but it carries the core meaning of the term rather than simply modifying it. This is why some people search for it as a prefix, even though it is technically a root.
Enter/o is one of the most useful roots to learn in medical terminology, because intestinal terms come up often. It pairs naturally with the stomach root gastr/o and the colon root col/o, and with common suffixes such as -itis (inflammation) and -pathy (disease).
Example words using enter/o
Related word parts
gastr/o · col/o · hepat/o · -itis · -pathy