Impatient is how you feel when waiting hurts. The man behind you in the queue sighing at the till, the driver leaning on the horn a second after the light changes, the child in the back seat asking are we there yet for the ninth time.
Two small words split the meaning in half. Impatient WITH somebody means you are irritated by them — he gets impatient with his mother on the phone. Impatient FOR something, or impatient TO do something, means you want it now and the waiting is unbearable: impatient for the summer, impatient to open the envelope. The first is close to cross; the second is close to eager, and there is nothing unkind in it at all. The noun is impatience, the adverb impatiently, and the word hiding inside is its own opposite, patient.
1adjectiveimpatientAnnoyed by waiting or by someone else's slowness.
“He grew impatient with the endless questions and walked out.”
2adjectiveeagerEager for something to happen and unwilling to wait for it.
“She was impatient to get home and tell them the news.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Impatient came through Old French impacient from Latin impatiēns. The im- on the front is the small negative that also builds impossible and imperfect, so an impatient person is, at root, an un-patient one — the word is a refusal with a prefix.
Latin
impatiēns
Old French
impacient
English, today
impatient
From Old French impacient (modern French impatient), from Latin impatiēns. by surface analysis, im- + patient.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA