Definition of "patient"
patient
adjective
comparative patienter or more patient, superlative patientest or most patient
Constant in pursuit or exertion; persevering; calmly diligent.
Quotations
“Her personal life and her art were very intertwined: You can’t really separate them,” explains Sophia Jansson. “She mirrored her own a reality onto a fictional reality.” And this is perhaps the nub of the Moomin’s enduring appeal: a combination of adventuresome spirit and philosophy, all of which Jansson derived from close and patient observation, of human relationships and of the natural world alike.
December 15, 2016, Hettie Judah in the New York Times, Beloved Children’s-Book Characters, in Their Own Immersive World
In contrast, the Westminster Gazette in 1912 was much more positive about railway staff, praising the "...army of porters hustling and bustling hither and thither with barrows groaning under the weight of bags and baggage and... the ever-patient and long-suffering guards, courteously giving information and advice to the querulous passengers... to the porter the Christmas season means a continuous round of heavy labour, extremely tiring to both nerves and temper, and this fact the public too often seem either to forget or ignore."
2022 December 14, David Turner, “The Edwardian Christmas getaway...”, in RAIL, number 972, page 35
(obsolete) Physically able to suffer or bear.
Quotations
To this outward structure was joined that strength of constitution, patient of severest toil and hardship; insomuch that for the most part of his life, in the fiercest extremity of cold, he took no other advantage of a fire, than at the greatest distance that he could, to look upon it.
1661, John Fell, “Doctor Henry Hammond”, in Christopher Wordsworth, editor, Ecclesiastical Biography, volume 5, published 1810, page 380
noun
plural patients
A person or animal who receives treatment from a doctor or other medically educated person.
Quotations
An artificial kidney these days still means a refrigerator-sized dialysis machine. Such devices mimic […] real kidneys […] . But they are nothing like as efficient, and can cause bleeding, clotting and infection—not to mention inconvenience for patients, who typically need to be hooked up to one three times a week for hours at a time.
2013 June 1, “A better waterworks”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 5 (Technology Quarterly)
One who, or that which, is passively affected; a passive recipient.
Quotations
The starting point is that all events involve an agent and a patient. Agents and patients are modelled as (material or non-material) objects, and can therefore be represented as points in conceptual spaces.
2010, Mohua Banerjee, Anil Seth, Logic and Its Applications: Fourth Indian Conference, ICLA 2011, page 7