Eruption is the dental word for a tooth's journey from under the gum into your child's smile.

In kid words

Eruption just means a tooth is pushing its way up through your gum until you can see it in your smile. It's a little like a tiny volcano, except a tooth comes up instead of lava. It happens to your very first teeth, and it happens again years later to your grown-up teeth.

The parent version

Eruption is the dental term for a tooth moving through the jaw and gum tissue until it breaks the surface and becomes visible in the mouth. The word covers two different waves: the primary, or baby, teeth that erupt during infancy and the toddler years, and the permanent teeth that erupt later, gradually taking their place through childhood and into the teenage years.

Most children roughly follow a general order and a general timeframe, but a wide range around that is still considered ordinary, and one child's teeth can erupt earlier or later than a sibling's without anything being wrong. If a tooth seems unusually late, or eruption looks unusual in some other way, ask your pediatric dentist rather than guess at home.

Where you might hear it at our office

A growth check is part of every routine visit, and eruption is a lot of what that check is actually watching: which teeth have already arrived, which ones are still expected, and whether the order looks like the order most children's mouths tend to follow. Most of the time that quick read is reassuring and needs nothing more than a mention.

Eruption running noticeably early, late, or out of its usual order is often caught right there, long before it needs any real action, and it is one of the threads that can lead toward a closer look through orthodontics, where a child's growth keeps getting followed over time. If another word from today's visit is still a mystery, the rest of the dictionary is right here.

Related words

Words that often come up alongside eruption: dentition, deciduous teeth, exfoliation.