Common Drug Suffixes

As a pharmacy technician, you will need to become familiar with several different medications. This will include knowing the brand and generic names as well as what these medications are used for. This can be intimidating at first, but learning to use some specific clues and tricks will help. At KLR Pharmacy Technician Training School, students have worked together to come up with additional clues to remember some of these, but below is a list of common drug suffixes (the ending part of a word), and some examples and tips for each one. It is important to remember when utilizing these clues, that you are using the generic name of the medication! Once you have these clues memorized, you can simply look at the generic name of a medication and know what it is used for! For example, Xanax has a generic name of Alprazolam. For someone with knowledge of these clues, it would be easy to look at the generic name ending and recognize that this medication is used for anxiety!