Inpatient

How to spell inpatient

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce inpatient

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inpatient mean?

1. nounA patient who is admitted to a hospital and stays overnight or longer to receive treatment.
2. adjectiveRelating to medical treatment in which the patient is admitted to and stays in a hospital.

Inpatient in a sentence

• noun

  After the operation she was kept on the ward as an inpatient for five nights.

• adjective

  The clinic offers both inpatient and outpatient mental health services.

• noun

  The hospital expanded its inpatient beds to cope with winter admissions.

• adjective

  The surgeon recommended an inpatient procedure requiring a two-night stay.

Where does inpatient come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is a relatively modern English compound built on the much older word 'patient', which traces back to the Latin verb pati, meaning 'to suffer' or 'to endure'. The present participle of that verb, patiens, literally described someone who bears or undergoes something, and by the 1300s English had borrowed 'patient' through Old French to mean a person under medical care, that is, one who endures treatment. The prefix here is the locational 'in', meaning 'inside' or 'within', and it was attached to mark a patient who stays inside the hospital overnight, as opposed to an 'outpatient' who comes and goes the same day. The pairing 'inpatient' and 'outpatient' emerged in hospital administration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as institutions formalised how they classified care. The crucial spelling trap is that 'inpatient' (in-hospital) looks and sounds almost identical to 'impatient' (restless, eager), yet they are unrelated in meaning: 'impatient' uses the negating prefix 'im-' to say 'not patient', while 'inpatient' uses the locating prefix 'in-' to say 'staying within'.

How the word is built

• in- (inside, within: indicating residence in hospital)
• patient (one who receives medical treatment, from Latin patiens 'suffering, enduring')