Patience

How to spell patience

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce patience

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does patience mean?

1. nounThe capacity to accept delay, trouble, or annoyance without becoming upset.
2. nounA solo card game in which the player arranges cards according to set rules; known in North America as solitaire.

Patience in a sentence

• Teaching a child to tie shoelaces requires a great deal of patience.

• On rainy evenings she liked to deal out a game of patience at the kitchen table.

• After an hour in the queue, her patience finally ran out.

• He shuffled the deck and laid out a hand of patience to pass the time.

Where does patience come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin patientia, meaning 'the quality of bearing or enduring', which was built on the verb pati, literally 'to suffer' or 'to endure'. The present participle of that verb, patiens, gave the sense of someone calmly bearing hardship or delay. English took the word in around the thirteenth century through Old French pacience, where it already meant calm endurance of pain or provocation. The very same Latin root pati sits inside 'patient' (one who suffers an illness) and 'passion' (originally suffering, as in the religious sense), which explains why patience and the plural 'patients' sound identical and trip writers up. The soft -ence ending, with its hidden /s/ sound, is the spelling trap, since the ear gives no clue that the word ends in -ce rather than -ts.

How the word is built

• pati- (from Latin pati: to suffer, endure)
• -ence (noun-forming suffix denoting a quality or state)