Patience
Patience reached its high-water mark in 2006 at number 577, and has been recorded 12,469 times in all. In 2025 it ranked 1,295th. About 11,000 Patiences are alive in the United States today, and half of them are over 20.
Popularity, 1880–2025
girls named Patience boys named Patience
By the numbers
- Total US births
- 12,469
- Estimated living today
- 11,000
- Median age today
- 20
- Peak year
- 2006
- Best rank
- 577th
- Rank in 2025
- 1,295th
- First recorded
- 1880
- Girls / boys
- 12,425 / 44
How old the living Patiences are
born that year still alive today
Of the 12,469 babies given the name since 1880, about 11,000 are alive — 92 in every hundred. Roughly 4,600 of them are children and 410 are 65 or over. The dotted line is the median: half were born before 2005 and half after.
An estimate, not a count. SSA births aged forward through SSA cohort life tables, which know nothing about who left the country or arrived in it — so for a name that mostly came to America rather than being born in it, this is a floor rather than a figure. Where you fall among living Americans.
Where the name comes from
Origin English
From patience, a virtue name first used by Puritans in the sixteenth century.
Etymology from Wiktionary, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Notable Patiences
- Patience Ozokwor (born 1958)Nigerian actress
- Patience Dabany (born 1937)Gabonese musician
- Patience Cooper (1905–1983)Indian actress
- Patience Jonathan (born 1957)former First Lady of Nigeria and permanent secretary in Bayelsa
- Patience Okon George (born 1991)Nigerian sprinter
People named Patience with articles in the most Wikipedia languages. Data from Wikidata (CC0).
Where Patience is most common
Relative to how many babies each state records, Patience is most concentrated in Arkansas (2.1×), Georgia (2.0×), South Carolina (1.9×), Tennessee (1.9×).
Total births recorded in each state since 1910. Browse names by state.
Names of 2006
The most popular girls’ names the year Patience peaked:
Patience elsewhere
| Country | Spelling | Births | Best rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| England and Wales girls | Patience | 369 | 928th |
| France girls | Patience | 75 | 3,224th |
Counts come from each country's own records and are not comparable with the US figures above, which cover different years and a different definition of a recorded name. Where a country writes the name several ways, the spellings are added together and the most common is shown. A row marked name registrations is counting something else: Portugal ranks each of a child's two given names separately, so a girl registered Maria Leonor is in both the Maria row and the Leonor row, and that figure is not a number of children.
Patience among the living
How many people each country's register counts under the name, rather than how many were given it in any one year. Each register was read on one date, and they are not the same date.
| Country | Spelling | First forename | Any forename |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finland girls | Patience | 17 | 21 |
A count of people on a register – Finland on 4 August 2026 – and not of births, so it cannot be compared with the figures above. Names with very few bearers are withheld, and a dash in the first-forename column means the register would not say rather than that nobody goes by it.
Where Patience lives in Spain
Not a count of births but of people: 181 women called Patience were living in Spain on 1 January 2025, of every age, born in any year. Where they live is not spread evenly.
Women: the provinces where it is densest
| Province | Spelling | People | Per thousand | Place there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Araba/Álava | Patience | 12 | 0.069 | 1,092 |
| Lleida | Patience | 5 | 0.022 | 2,103 |
| Girona | Patience | 9 | 0.022 | 2,174 |
| Navarra | Patience | 7 | 0.020 | 2,332 |
| Gipuzkoa | Patience | 6 | 0.016 | 2,342 |
| Murcia | Patience | 10 | 0.013 | 2,693 |
Listed in 10 of Spain's 52 provinces. In the other 42 it is either held by fewer than 5 people – the point below which the source withholds a name – or it fell past the 5,000 names the source will print for one province. Neither means nobody there is called it. The rate is the source's own, not a share worked out here.
Related names
Patience against another name
Two names on one chart, with the year one overtook the other.
Try it on yourself
Source: US Social Security Administration, national and state baby-name files, 1880–2025. Counts include only births registered with the SSA, and names with fewer than five births in a year are not published. The living estimate applies SSA cohort life tables to those births; it counts people born in the United States, so it misses anyone who arrived later and anyone who has left.