In British usage, dentures are removable false teeth. A complete denture replaces every tooth in one jaw and rests on the gum. A partial denture fills one or more gaps and holds on with clasps that grip the teeth still in place. Both come out at night, both are cleaned out of the mouth, and both are replaced every few years as the shape of the ridge underneath them changes.

The wider family of dental prosthetics also covers work that stays in the mouth: crowns, bridges, veneers and restorations carried by implants. Dentists discuss these alongside dentures, which is why the two are often compared in the same appointment. This guide deals with both, with most of its weight on the removable appliances that the word normally means. It sets out how each one is made, how long it takes, what it is like to live with, how it is cleaned and what it costs on the NHS and privately in the UK.

“Turkey teeth” is a British coinage. It appeared on social media and in the tabloid press to name a look: very white, very even, slightly too large for the face. The phrase says nothing about which treatment produced that look, and this is where most of the trouble starts. In the cases that have made the news, the patients had not been given veneers. They had been given crowns, on teeth that were healthy enough to keep.

The difference is not a matter of vocabulary. A veneer is a thin shell bonded to the front face of a tooth that stays otherwise intact. A crown is a cap that encircles the whole tooth, which has to be reduced on every surface before it can be fitted. One treatment takes a fraction of a millimetre from the visible surface; the other reshapes the entire tooth into a stump. Ten years later, those two mouths are not in the same condition.

An inlay and an onlay are indirect restorations: the piece is made outside the mouth, in a laboratory or by milling, and then bonded into a tooth that has been prepared for it. It repairs a tooth that is still in place, damaged by decay, by a fracture or by an old filling that has grown too large to be replaced like for like. A tooth that is no longer there calls for something else entirely, and that distinction runs through everything below.

What they are for becomes clear once you place them between the two treatments on either side. A direct filling, shaped in the mouth in one sitting, is quicker and cheaper. A crown, at the other end, covers the whole tooth and means preparing it all the way round. Inlays and onlays rebuild a large cavity while preparing only the part that has failed, which is why they come up when a filling would be stretched to its limit and a crown looks like more than the tooth needs.

This article sets out what separates an inlay from an onlay, when each is indicated, what the material changes, how long these restorations last according to published studies, what an NHS band 3 course of treatment costs, and the point at which a crown becomes the sensible choice again.

A fixed denture is cemented or screwed into place, and you cannot take it out yourself. Only your dentist can remove it, in the surgery. Two kinds of support are possible: your own teeth, prepared to carry the restoration, or one or more implants placed in the jawbone. That choice then governs how long the work is expected to last, what maintenance it needs and how much of it the NHS will cover. This article sets out the devices available, when each is indicated, the survival rates reported in the literature, the two ways a restoration can be held in place and what the whole thing costs in Britain.