The word was recorded in English by 1200, from Old French, and before that, Latin. William Langland, in Piers Plowman, used it for the suffering of a man condemned to death, questioned by a Roman official named Pilate.
Old French had already used the word by the tenth century, for Christ's suffering specifically. When it reached English around 1200, it replaced an existing native word for suffering, a word no longer in common use today, though it survives in dialect as a rare verb meaning to endure hardship without complaint.
Behind the Latin word lay a verb, patī, meaning 'to suffer, or to endure'. The deeper origin of that verb is uncertain, with no confirmed root beyond it.
PATIENT and PATIENCE share the exact same root. PATIENT entered English in the mid-fourteenth century, describing someone able to endure misfortune without complaint. PATIENCE entered English around 1200, meaning the quality of calmly bearing suffering.
By the sixteenth century the word had also come to mean fits of rage, and, separately, a sense captured in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in 1599. By the seventeenth century the word took on another sense, one that Roald Dahl later used in his novel My Uncle Oswald, when stating that embracing something fully, rather than staying lukewarm, was the only way to live.
Seven letters.
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