Bicuspid: the in-between tooth built to tear and mash.

In kid words

"Bicuspids are your in-between teeth, the ones that help you tear and mash your food." Say it plain, the same easy way you would name any other tooth.

Your child does not need to remember the word bicuspid. They just need to know it is a normal tooth with a normal job, so if the dentist says it out loud, nothing about it feels like a secret.

The parent version

Bicuspids, more commonly called premolars, are the teeth that sit between the canines (the pointed teeth toward the front) and the molars (the wider, flatter teeth in back). Most people end up with eight of them, four upper and four lower.

The name comes from the two raised points, or cusps, on the chewing surface, which fits, since tearing and grinding are the two jobs these teeth split between them. Baby teeth do not include bicuspids. Premolars are part of the adult set, arriving later and generally taking the place of certain baby molars.

Exactly when and how a child's own bicuspids come in varies, and anything specific to your child's spacing or timeline is a question for your pediatric dentist.

Where you might hear it at our office

Bicuspid tends to come up during an ordinary cleaning and exam, when your pediatric dentist is counting teeth and noting what has newly arrived since your child's last checkup. Watching for these teeth as they come in is part of why that routine visit matters, even on a day when nothing hurts.

If a bicuspid looks crowded, angled, or slow to arrive, that gets pointed out and explained in plain language, with any next step decided together with your pediatric dentist. You can look up any other unfamiliar word in the rest of the dental dictionary.

Related words

Canine. Molar. Cusp.