Buccal corridor is the smile-aesthetics term for the shadowed space at the corners of a smile.

In kid words

"When you smile really big, there is sometimes a little shadowy space back by the corners of your mouth, past your teeth, and dentists call that a buccal corridor." Every smile has a bit of it, some more than others. It is nothing but a name for a shape, not anything wrong with your smile.

The parent version

Buccal corridor refers to the darker, shadowed space visible at the corners of a smile, between the outer edge of the back teeth and the inside of the cheek, when someone smiles broadly. The word borrows from buccal, the dental term for the cheek-facing side of a tooth.

It shows up mostly in conversations about smile aesthetics, meaning how a smile looks as a whole rather than the health of any single tooth. How wide or narrow a buccal corridor appears varies naturally from person to person, and mainstream sources treat it as one factor among several in how a smile is perceived, with plenty of disagreement over how much it actually matters. It is not a measurement of anything being wrong.

Where you might hear it at our office

This is more of a vocabulary word from the orthodontic side of things than one you would hear at a typical cleaning. If smile appearance ever comes up as part of a growth check, it sits alongside other orthodontic vocabulary like bite and alignment, all part of the bigger picture your pediatric dentist and Dr. Whitesides look at together over time.

One more unfamiliar word from a visit? The Kids' Dental Dictionary keeps translating them, one entry at a time.

Related words

Bite. Malocclusion. Orthodontics.