Patience

given name · Latin script

Meaning: Rare Scottish surname, prominent in Avoch (Black Isle); likely arrived from north-east England in the 1780s–90s

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/peɪʃəns/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Patience is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Nigeria than in any other country, where it is the 35th most common given name.

rarermore common
  • NGNigeria≈1 in 490(inferred from the name graph)
  • GHGhana≈1 in 1.4K
  • ZASouth Africa≈1 in 1.9K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Nigeria (inferred from the name graph)

≈440,000 people, est.

Sources
349 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 490 (inferred from the name graph)

Nigeria, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Rare Scottish surname, prominent in Avoch (Black Isle); likely arrived from north-east England in the 1780s–90s.

Sources 1

  • Scottish Surnames

Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Patience counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Patience is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
NG Nigeria#35≈440,000 est.≈1 in 490—Patience108
ZA South Africa#323≈30,000 est.≈1 in 1.9K—Patience60
GH Ghana#67≈21,000 est.≈1 in 1.4K101KPatience59
KE Kenya—≈13,000 est.≈1 in 4K—Patience21
US United States—10,8711 in 31K11KPatience349
CM Cameroon#577≈9,900 est.≈1 in 2.8K—Patience20

Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: Heuristic parse of ghanacitizenship.com; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Patience is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Swahili given name7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, United States

    Languages: Swahili, Southern Sotho, Kinyarwanda

    Also written Pàtience

59 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Patience is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • A fairly rare name in Scotland but prominent in the Avoch area of the Black Isle, for long a Scots-speaking enclave in a Gaelic region. The Patiences may have come to the area from north-east England in the 1780s and ’90s when the herring fishing was developing and already managed by large companies. John Patience, born in Avoch in 1865, died in Yarraville, Victoria in 1944, and had 14 children.

    as a nameScottish Surnames

  • In English, The quality of being patient.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, holima (?) ndi- léi; ndilomalekulo = wait a little

    as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language

  • In English, One of the seven virtues

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • In ibb, Im4 have patience - n14 1m4 (habitually)

    as a wordIbibio Dictionary. Final Report

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Notable people with this name(measured from records)

1700180019002000Patience Wright, b. 1725Patience Cooper, b. 1905Patience Collier, b. 1910Patience Darton, b. 1911Patience Abbe, b. 1924Patience Cleveland, b. 1931Patience Dabany, b. 1944Patience Wheatcroft, Baroness Wheatcroft, b. 1951Patience Jonathan, b. 1957Patience Ozokwor, b. 1958

The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).

How to address them(machine-generated)

InformalHi Patience,

A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 54 sources across 32 countries.

Official registers attesting Patience
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202011K#2,336
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)2025172—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202092#2,336
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)20236—

Reference works 3

  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Patience mean, and where does it come from?
Rare Scottish surname, prominent in Avoch (Black Isle); likely arrived from north-east England in the 1780s–90s. Recorded by Scottish Surnames.
Is Patience a male or female name?
Patience is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
How do you pronounce Patience?
A machine transcription gives /peɪʃəns/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Patience have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 437 thousand people named Patience in Nigeria, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled patience.
How common is the name Patience?
In the United States, the national register counted 10,871 people named Patience in 2020, about 1 in 31 thousand residents.
How common is Patience compared with other names?
In Nigeria, Patience is the 35th most common given name of 138,191 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Patience?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/patience

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Patience” — the 35th most common given name in Nigeria. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Patience parses inside a full name →