Veterinary Dentistry – Dental Diseases Practice Exam

Recognize how charting marks communicate tooth status at a glance. An X drawn over a tooth space is a quick way to show that the tooth is not present in the mouth. In many charting systems, that marks a tooth as missing because it has been extracted, but when a charting method isn’t standardized, the X can be used to indicate a missing tooth in the record. This makes X the best fit for representing a tooth that is absent in this context. Restorations with crowns, and signs of impaction, are shown with different symbols or notations, so they don’t match the meaning of the X here.