patience
pa·tience/ˈpeɪ̯.ʃəns/noun
patience is spelled P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E, 2 syllables: pa·tience. The wrong spelling people search most is paitience: about 40 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 435 of all searches for the word. Patience is a noun meaning “The quality of being patient”. The plural of patience is patiences.
How many letters and syllables are in patience?
| Letters | 8: P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 2: pa·tience |
| In writing | 16 times per million words; the 5,121st most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | 1; the most searched, paitience, about 40 Bing searches a month (all of them) |
| Pairs people search |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026).
How do you spell patience?
Patience is spelled P-A-T-I-E-N-C-E. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 440 of the searches for patience in either form.
Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.
How common is patience?
Patience appears 16 times per million words in written English, the 5,121st most frequent word form in the list. The list counts every capitalisation together, so this includes Patience, the name.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce patience?
- US /ˈpeɪ̯.ʃəns/
- Australia /ˈpæɪ̯.ʃəns/
- /ˈpe.ʃəns/
Patience has 2 syllables, split pa·tience in writing.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-inlandnorth-patience.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Words people confuse with patience
Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).
Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).
Forms of patience
- patiences plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does patience mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 1
The quality of being patient.
Musical perfection requires practice and a lot of patience.
- 2
UKAny of various card games that can be played by one person.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Patience in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
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 patience come from?
Inherited 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 Old English ġeþyld.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).