The Latin Roots of Muscles Names

A lot of students come to me for help because they have troubles learning the names of skeletal muscles of the human muscular system. These muscles names are derived from Latin. At first you would think this as a hindrance but actually most of the time you could use these names as clues to help you learn the shape of the muscles, their locations and what they do. All you need is a dictionary or some guide book to help you translate Latin to English.

Let us look at a group of muscles called Flexor muscles. This is a group of muscle with the word Flexor at the beginning of the muscle name. Flexor is derived from modern Latin Flexus, the past participle of Flectere which means ‘bender’. Let us now pick one of these Flexor muscles, for example Flexor carpi radialis. Carpi is modern Latin meaning ‘wrist’. Radialis is used here to refer to the position of the muscle on radial side the forearm (that is, near or at the radius bone).

The next muscle we should look at is the Flexor carpi ulnaris. Flexor carpi we already know means “wrist bender” and Ulnaris refers to the position at the ulna bone. Therefore, Flexor carpi ulnaris means ‘wrist bender at ulna’ or ‘bender of the wrist at the ulna’.

Let us now apply what we have learned so far on a longer muscle name; Flexor digiti minimi brevis. This is kind of a whole phrase in Latin. Flexor we already know means ‘bender’. In this case Digiti means ‘pointing thing’. Since we point with our fingers this applies to the fingers. Minimi comes from Minimus meaning ‘least or smallest’. Brevis means ‘short’. So from Flexor digiti minimi brevis, we have the following words: bender, finger, smallest, short. In English, this means ‘short smallest finger bender’. This can be adjusted to ‘the short muscle that bends the little finger’.

Here is a list with a selection of major skeletal muscles of the human body including the meaning of their names. This list is arranged by location.