Posterior teeth are the back teeth, built mainly for chewing and grinding food.

In kid words

"Your posterior teeth are your back teeth, the wide ones that do most of your chewing." They sit further back than the teeth you see first in a smile, tucked toward your cheeks, and their flatter, bumpier tops are built for grinding food down small.

The parent version

Posterior teeth is the clinical term for the back teeth: the premolars and molars. Where the front teeth work more like a pair of scissors, posterior teeth work more like a mill, their wider, bumpier tops built to crush and grind food into pieces small enough to swallow.

This group keeps growing for longer than any other. Baby posterior teeth are limited to molars alone, since primary teeth skip premolars entirely, and permanent premolars, plus additional permanent molars, keep arriving well into the teenage years. Your pediatric dentist tracks this whole group's progress at routine visits.

Where you might hear it at our office

When one of these teeth needs a crown, it is typically durable stainless steel, chosen because posterior teeth take on the heaviest workload of any teeth in the mouth, day after day. A front tooth gets a different material entirely, picked more for blending into a smile than for standing up to grinding.

Their deep grooves also make posterior teeth the usual candidates for a protective sealant, one more reason a routine visit matters even when nothing hurts. Any other word worth translating is probably already in the rest of the dictionary.

Related words

Anterior teeth. Molar. Premolar.