Spelling How to spell: triage or triage

It is estimated that there are half a million medical terms and many of them are especially prone to being spelled incorrectly

Spelling How to spell: triage or triage

It is estimated that there are half a million medical terms and many of them are especially prone to being spelled incorrectly. Uncommonly used words, complex morphologies and foreign voice adaptations are the most common reasons for making mistakes. Added to all this is the ignorance of the basic rules of spelling. As an example, the word triage. Or is it triage? How is this written?

Without going into unnecessary detours, triaj is written with a jota. It comes from the French triage, the same form that English has taken, and refers to the method used in emergency medicine to select and classify patients, according to the type and severity of their illness, before they receive the care they need. The Dictionary of Medical Terms of the Royal National Academy of Medicine offers the word prioritization as a synonym and asks not to confuse triage with indrawing, which means "retraction or depression of the suprasternal, supraclavicular, intercostal and subcostal spaces that occurs on inspiration".

The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) includes the term triage with the definition given in the previous paragraph, so it must be written in full, not in italics as is the case with other technical terms and neologisms. The term also refers to the place where said classification of patients is made, although the first meaning of triage that it offers is "action and effect of triage", that is, to choose, separate and select.

It may be that the tendency of some to write triage, with G, is produced by reading medical texts in English and French, a circumstance that nevertheless does not hide the lack of knowledge of the spelling rules of G and J. Broadly speaking, The use of these two letters does not offer pitfalls when they are preceded by the vowels "a", "o" and "u2, more doubts arise when the sound g/j precedes "e" and "i". It would not hurt a brief review of the basic rules as the Fundación del Español Urgente (Fundéu RAE) does in this article on the rules of spelling for ge and jota:

In addition, it is necessary to remember that the g with the e and the i have a strong guttural sound (as in people or in giant); to represent that same soft sound, a silent u is placed between the g and the e or the i: war, stew...; when that middle u sounds, it is written with an umlaut, like in penguin.

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