Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

impatience

UK/ɪmˈpeɪʃəns/US/ɪmˈpeɪʃəns/
nounB2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,598 of 15,258leans spoken

Impatience is the unwillingness to wait for anything. Tapping fingers, checking the time, sighing audibly.

It takes with or at, and it describes both a moment and a temperament. There is a positive version, since impatience with the way things are is what drives reform, and describing somebody as impatient for change is a compliment. The commoner use is a complaint. The adjective impatient is far more frequent than the noun, and its opposite, patience, is one of the oldest virtues in English.

Rijksmuseum · CC0

Definitions of impatience

  1. 1nounimpatienceUnwillingness to wait or tolerate delay.B2

    “He could not hide his impatience with the whole process.”

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *peh₁-

  2. Latin

    impatientia

  3. Old French

    impacience

  4. Middle English

    impacience

  5. English, today

    impatience

Middle English impacience, from Old French impacience (modern impatience), from Latin impatientia. by surface analysis, im- + patience.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building

First appears in chapter 31 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

impatience in the wild

  • Stifling the batsman in this manner can lead to impatience and frustration, resulting in rash play by the batsman which in turn can lead to a quick dismissal.

    Leg theory

  • Board of Education in favor of integration, and showed impatience with efforts to end segregation.

    Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education

  • The impatience of the king and the severity of the winter then compelled him to return home.

    Battle of Nish (1443)

  • Ell admitted that his impatience often led to his dismissal.

    Jimmy Ell

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • patience