page_title: Anatomical terms of location
section_title: Combined terms
hierarchical_section_title: Anatomical terms of location / Introduction / Combined terms
caption_attribution_description: English: Holotype of Mantophryne insignis, a male in dorsolateral view
context_page_description: Standard anatomical terms of location deal unambiguously with the anatomy of animals, including humans.
  All vertebrates, including humans, have the same basic body plan: they are strictly bilaterally symmetrical in early embryonic stages and largely bilaterally symmetrical in adulthood. If they are divided down the middle, in other words, they have mirror-image left and right halves. For those reasons, the basic directional terms can be considered to be those used in vertebrates. By extension, the same terms are used for many other invertebrate organisms.
  While the terms are standardized within specific fields of biology, there are unavoidable, sometimes dramatic, differences between some disciplines. For example, differences in terminology remain a problem that to some extent still separates the terminology of human anatomy from the one that is used in the study of various other zoological categories.
context_section_description: Many anatomical terms can be combined, either to indicate a position in two axes simultaneously or to indicate the direction of a movement relative to the body. For example, "anterolateral" indicates a position that is both anterior and lateral to the body axis (such as the bulk of the pectoralis major muscle). In radiology, an X-ray image may be said to be "anteroposterior", indicating that the beam of X-rays pass from their source to patient's anterior body wall through the body to exit through posterior body wall.
  There is no definite limit to the contexts in which terms may be modified to qualify each other in such combinations. Generally the modifier term is truncated and an "o" or an "i" is added in prefixing it to the qualified term. For example, a view of an animal from an aspect at once dorsal and lateral might be called a "dorsolateral" view; and the effect of dorsolateral flattening in an organism such as a krait gives its body a triangular cross section. Again, in describing the morphology of an organ or habitus of an animal such as many of the Platyhelminthes, one might speak of it as "dorsiventrally" flattened as opposed to bilaterally flattened animals such as ocean sunfish.
  Where desirable three or more terms may be agglutinated or concatenated, as in "anteriodorsolateral". Such terms sometimes used to be hyphenated, but the modern tendency is to omit the hyphen. There is however little basis for any strict rule to interfere with choice of convenience in such usage.
caption: Anatomical terms can be combined to be more specific. This is a dorsolateral view of the frog Mantophryne insignis.
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