Tooth chart: numbers, names and treatment-plan decoder

It is not a sequence number but two digits: the first is the quadrant of the jaw, the second is the position of the tooth counted from the midline. Thirty-six means the third quadrant (lower left), sixth tooth from the center — that is, the first large molar. By the same logic 1.1 is the upper right front tooth and 4.8 is the lower right wisdom tooth. The system is called FDI and is used almost everywhere except the United States, which counts 1 to 32 straight around the mouth instead.

No, that is how a dentist draws the chart: they are facing you, so your right side is on their left. This is the single most common reason patients get the side wrong when reading their own plan. The “As in a mirror” switch flips the chart to the view you see when you look at your own teeth — compare the two and it becomes obvious which side is meant.

They are shorthand for the state of the tooth. In English-language records you will typically see C for caries, F for filling, Cr for crown, I for implant, M or X for a missing tooth, RR for a retained root. Records from Russian-speaking clinics use Cyrillic letters for the same things, and the tool recognizes both — the two alphabets are visually indistinguishable, and clinics print in either. A key to the abbreviations is usually printed on the first page of the record itself.

That happens: plans are written in free text and there is no single format. That is why the breakdown is shown line by line — next to your original line you can see exactly what was read, so a mistake is immediately visible. The most reliable forms are numbers with a dot (2.6), comma-separated lists and ranges inside one quadrant (14-17). A bare two-digit number in free text is deliberately not treated as a tooth, otherwise the date “19 September” would highlight a tooth that does not exist.

No. The first large molar — the sixth tooth from the center — comes in as a permanent tooth and replaces no baby tooth at all: it erupts behind the whole row, in a place where there was no tooth before. It is routinely mistaken for a baby tooth and left untreated on the assumption that it will fall out by itself. It stays for life and is statistically the first permanent tooth people lose. Click the sixth tooth on the chart: the card says plainly whether it replaces anything.

Because a cavity rarely sits on exactly one side. A tooth has five surfaces: two approximal ones (toward and away from the midline), the outer one facing the cheek, the inner one facing the tongue or palate, and the chewing surface on top. “MOD” means the filling covers the mesial, occlusal and distal surfaces at once — that is harder and more expensive work than a small single-surface filling.