Patience

given name · English · Latin script

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

Patience is a given name, most frequently recorded in Nigeria, where it is the 67th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Akan, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Rare Scottish surname, prominent in Avoch (Black Isle); likely arrived from north-east England in the 1780s–90s.

rarermore common
  • NGNigeria1 in 968◐
  • ZASouth Africa1 in 3K
  • GHGhana1 in 6.9K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈11K ●

across 6 countries

Sources
316 ●

192K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 31K ◐

United States

Meaning & origin●

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●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Patience is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
NG Nigeria#6775,293122K rec.——Patience103
ZA South Africa#28811,26312K rec.——Patience59
US United States—10,77943K rec.1 in 31K11KPatience316
GB United Kingdom—4,2024.4K rec.—listedPatience110
GH Ghana#1382,4731.8K rec.—101KPatience56
CA Canada—1,2691K rec.—1Patience78
AU Australia—1,2301.9K rec.—4Patience72
DE Germany—375373 rec.—1Patience64
KE Kenya—30052 rec.——Patience22
IT Italy—281306 rec.——Patience30
CM Cameroon#431222291 rec.——Patience22
ES Spain—181515 rec.1 in 276K181Patience27

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

Languages●

  • English131K40%
  • Akan101K31%
  • Swahili66K20%
  • French4K1%
  • Spanish3.6K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English130,56140%
Akan101,02231%
Swahili65,68120%
French3,9711%
Spanish3,6241%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

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

  • Akan given name196K records spelled Patience7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya

    Languages: Akan, Swahili, Southern Sotho

    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●

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.

Over time●

0200400600190019502000508 · 2006

Show as table
Patience in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1880–2025
Yearrecords
18807
18816
18826
18836
18847
188511
18878
18888
18909
189112
18926
18935
189411
18959
189611
18979
189910
190010
190110
19025
19037
19048
19057
19067
190813
19098
191011
19117
191311
191418
191518
191617
191726
191819
191917
192018
192114
192217
192320
192421
192512
192616
192714
192818
192913
19309
193118
193215
19337
193416
193516
193617
193724
193827
193922
194021
194136
194220
194327
194419
194516
194622
194724
194816
194915
195018
195117
195215
195324
195430
195527
195629
195739
195830
195929
196039
196136
196235
196327
196439
196542
196645
196732
196833
196932
197039
197150
197254
197394
197477
197589
197679
197790
1978102
197976
1980104
198178
198261
198370
198464
198563
198675
198765
198866
1989113
1990170
1991158
1992176
1993163
1994202
1995209
1996255
1997225
1998252
1999230
2000246
2001242
2002264
2003277
2004293
2005472
2006508
2007454
2008384
2009383
2010341
2011315
2012316
2013291
2014273
2015246
2016206
2017181
2018213
2019236
2020229
2021231
2022203
2023198
2024174
2025172

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 141 years between 1880–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

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).

Evidence●

Attested in 53 sources across 32 countries.

Official registers attesting Patience
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
GH GhanaHeuristic parse of ghanacitizenship.com2026101K#45
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202011K#2,336
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020504#45,684
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010484#44,423
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000407#48,665
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—181#9,752
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)2025172—
ES SpainINE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—172#4,572
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—118#6,947
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—117#7,680
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202092#2,336
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)202068—

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 2026-09-12 data build · 292 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Patience?
We estimate roughly 11 thousand people bear Patience (counting its spellings and scripts) across 6 countries in our records.
In which country does Patience have the most bearers?
Patience is most frequently recorded in Nigeria, where it is most often spelled patience.
How common is Patience compared with other names?
In Nigeria, Patience is the 67th most common given name of 146,224 given names recorded there.
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.
What does the name Patience mean?
Recorded meaning: Rare Scottish surname, prominent in Avoch (Black Isle); likely arrived from north-east England in the 1780s–90s.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/patience

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

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 67th most common given name in Nigeria. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Patience parses inside a full name →