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	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Clinical dermatology has always been a descriptive and morphologic specialty. Our early predecessors depended on the naked eye as their instrument of description and resorted to Latin terms to label diseases of the skin.^1-2 Consequently, we inherited a plethora of names of diseases with which we are still intimately involved. Although the raison d'être for our specialty is that dermatologists are morphologists, all disciplines in medicine have witnessed change, and dermatology is not an exception.³ To keep our specialty a scientific discipline, we must establish order in the current use of dermatological terms and refrain from using the ambiguous terminology that has become part of our specialty.

The simple rule for a revised dermatological lexicon is that clear, precise terms should be kept, and confusing or ambiguous ones changed. It is patently silly for each dermatologist to have his or her own set of terms.⁴

The great source of difficulty . . . [Full Text of this Article]