Other forms: patients
A patient is the person a doctor is treating — the one in the bed, the one on the chair with a sleeve rolled up, the name at the top of the file. A busy surgery sees sixty patients before lunch.
Patient is also an adjective, and it is the same word doing a second job: to be patient is to wait without letting it get to you. You are patient with a slow queue, patient with a child learning to tie a shoe, patient with a phone menu telling you for the fifth time that your call is important. Be patient with someone, be patient about something. The noun for the quality is patience — patient and patience are spelled differently and swapped constantly, so watch the ending: you need patience, you are patient. The opposites are impatient and impatience.
1nounpatientA person being treated by a doctor, a dentist or a hospital.~94%
“The doctor sees forty patients a day.”
2adjectivecalmAble to wait, or to put up with trouble, without getting annoyed.~6%
“Be patient — the bus comes every twenty minutes.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 133 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin patior meant to suffer, to endure. A patient is the one having something done to them and bearing it; being patient is bearing the wait. The doctor's patient and a patient parent are the same word doing the same work, and patience — Latin patientia, suffering and endurance — is the noun they share.
Proto-Indo-European
*peh₁- — to hate, hurt
Latin
patiens
Old French
pacient
Middle French
patient
Middle English
pacient
English, today
patient
Built from
From Middle English pacient, from Middle French patient, from Old French pacient, from Latin patiens, present participle of patior (“to suffer, endure”), from Proto-Indo-European peh₁- (“to hate, hurt”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA