Patience is the quiet strength to wait without complaining. Lose patience, have patience, the patience of a saint.
It is endurance rather than passivity, which the origin makes plain: the Latin means suffering. Patience is also the card game called solitaire in America, played alone. Note patient, both the adjective and the noun — a hospital patient is literally one who suffers, from exactly the same word.
1nounpatienceThe quiet strength to wait without complaining.
“Teaching small children takes a lot of patience.”
2nouncardA card game played alone.
“Grandpa sits at the kitchen table playing patience with an old pack of cards.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
patience is a quality of endurance.
Latin patientia comes from pati, to suffer or endure. Patient, passion and compassion come from the same suffering.
Proto-Indo-European
*peh₁-
Middle English
pacience
English, today
patience
Built from
From Middle English pacience. Middle English pacience, from Old French pacience (modern French patience), from Latin patientia (“suffering; endurance, patience”), from patiens, present active participle of patior (“suffer, experience, wait”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European peh₁- (“to hurt”). ġeþyld.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA