patience is the capacity to bear delay, difficulty, or provocation calmly and without complaint — to wait or to endure without being pushed into upset or impulse.
The word divides cleanly against its neighbors. Patience is passive where perseverance is active: patience absorbs a delay, perseverance keeps working through one. Forbearance narrows to restraint under provocation, usually restraint toward a person who has earned a sharper response. 📝Fortitude names the strength that meets danger or pain head-on, where patience names the strength that declines to act at all. A second, older sense survives in phrases like "constancy in labor," recorded from the 1510s, in which patience means sustained application rather than mere waiting. In British usage the word also names the single-player card game Americans call solitaire, a sense recorded from 1816 and taken directly from the endurance the game demands.
The word came into English around 1200 from Old French pacience and Latin patientia, "the quality of suffering or enduring," built on patiens, the present participle of pati, "to endure, undergo, experience." That root makes patience a close relative of patient, the one undergoing treatment, and of passion in its original sense of suffering — a lineage that frames the virtue as something borne rather than something performed. That framing has always drawn dissent: Ambrose Bierce defined patience in 📝The Devil's Dictionary as "a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue."