patience

From 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”). Displaced native Old English ġeþyld.

• IPA^(key): /ˈpeɪʃəns/

• Audio (US, Inland Northern American):

  (file)

patience (usually uncountable, plural patiences)

1. The quality of being patient.

   Musical perfection requires practice and a lot of patience.

   • 1944 September and October, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—I”, in Railway Magazine, page 283:

     The most surprising thing was to discover that each job had its little tricks, peculiarities that had been learned in the experience of years, and one of the really pleasing features was the unlimited patience and kindliness of the chargehands and fitters, who would go to great lengths to teach the budding engineer all they themselves knew.

2. Any of various card games that can be played by one person. Called solitaire in the US and Canada.

• forbearance
• restraint
• thild
• thole (obsolete, rare, or regional)

• impatience

• passion
• passionate
• passive
• passivity
• patient

• Sranan Tongo: pasensi

• “patience”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “patience”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

• clock patience
• garden patience

Inherited from Old French pacience, borrowed from Latin patientia.

• IPA^(key): /pa.sjɑ̃s/

• Audio:

  (file)

patience f (plural patiences)

1. patience

   Antonym: impatience

   Il faut beaucoup de patience pour apprendre une nouvelle langue.

   Learning a new language requires a lot of patience.

• → Russian: пасья́нс (pasʹjáns, “solitaire (game)”)

• “patience”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

patience

1. Alternative form of pacience