Buccal means the side of a tooth that faces the cheek.

In kid words

Buccal just means the cheek side of your teeth, the part that is closest to your cheek when you smile. It is the side the dentist can see from the outside, without looking inside your mouth at all. Dentists have a name for every side of a tooth, and buccal is simply the name for this one.

The parent version

Buccal describes the surface of a tooth that faces the cheek. Dentists name each surface of a tooth so they can describe the exact same spot every time, whether they are talking to each other or writing notes after a visit. The surface facing the tongue instead has its own name, lingual, and other surfaces have their own names too.

This is a word you are far more likely to overhear at the chair than to use at home. It describes location on a tooth, not a problem, so hearing it during a visit does not mean anything is wrong.

Where you might hear it at our office

During a cleaning and exam, our team narrates what they are checking as they go, so a word like buccal might simply come up because that is the surface in view at that moment. Comprehensive exams and professional cleanings are part of every routine visit, and naming tooth surfaces out loud is just part of how that gets described.

Any other word from a visit that did not quite stick can be looked up in the rest of the Kids' Dental Dictionary.

Related words

Words that often come up alongside buccal: lingual, cusp, molar.