Patience
Just 54 women in Poland carry it, and no newborn has been given it since 2000: most Poles have never met one. An English virtue name at root, from the Latin for patience and endurance.
Patience Pronunciation
Patience is pronounced paht-YEN-tse (/patˈjɛnt͡sɛ/).
What Patience means
Where Patience comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Patience comes from the Latin patientia, built on the verb pati, to suffer or endure. The word named a capacity before it named a person. English speakers turned it into a given name in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Puritan families favoured virtue names over saints. A child called Patience wore the meaning openly.
Those bearers were mostly girls, though the custom was not strict. Records from Puritan New England list Patience alongside Mercy, Prudence and Faith. The name crossed the Atlantic on ships and stayed in use for generations.
In Polish the sense lands as cierpliwość, patience and endurance in one word. There is no diminutive here, no softened variant to hide behind. Short, plain, exact.
Imagine a school register with the entry filled in full. The name says what it means: endurance, from Latin patientia.
How many people are named Patience
1 in 417478 women in Poland is named Patience. 54 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #5096 among female names.
Patience as a middle name
Patience is a first name for 54 women in Poland and a middle name for another 18, a 75/25 split. In the women's middle-name ranking it sits 1738th, between Ogechi (18) and Rabia (18).
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#1736 Nneka18
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#1737 Ogechi18
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#1738 Patience18
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#1739 Rabia18
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#1740 Randia18