inpatient
noun, adjective
inpatient is a noun meaning “A patient whose treatment requires at least one night's residence in a hospital; a hospitalized patient” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled I-N-P-A-T-I-E-N-T and has 3 syllables, and it appears 1.4 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of inpatient is inpatients.
What does inpatient mean?
noun
- 1
A patient whose treatment requires at least one night's residence in a hospital; a hospitalized patient.
adjective
- 1
Of treatment, requiring at least one night's residence in a hospital.
- 2
Alternative spelling of impatient.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce inpatient?
- US
Inpatient has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Wodencafe-inpatient.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of inpatient
- inpatients plural
- in-patient
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is inpatient?
Inpatient appears 1.4 times per million words in written English, the 23,536th most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Words people confuse with inpatient
Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).
Also written: impatient, in-patient (one word or two).
Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).
Inpatient in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense patient whose treatment needs at least one night's residence in a hospital:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | patient hospitalier |
| German | stationärer Patient |
| Portuguese | internado |
| Spanish | paciente hospitalizado/internado/interno, endopaciente |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does inpatient come from?
From in- (“internal”) + patient.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).