patients
noun
Form of patient , plural of patient.
Simple meaning
Someone who requires medical care.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
payshuhntsSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈpeɪʃənts
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
plural of patient
A person who requires medical care
“The number of emergency patients has grown rapidly.”
plural of patient
A person or animal that receives health care from a doctor, nurse, dentist, allied health practitioner, or other person educated in health care.
plural of patient
One who, or that which, is passively affected; a passive recipient.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A person who requires medical care
Used this way, patients is a specialist word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. This is a clinical use: it belongs to medical description, where it is factual rather than emotive.
“The number of emergency patients has grown rapidly.”
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Specialist/technical
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Specialized
- Connotation
- Clinical and technical
- Usage feel
- Technical and specialized
Where it naturally appears
- Medicine/healthcare
- Science
- Technical/specialist writing
Usage note
In general conversation this sense usually needs explaining — outside its field, people reach for a plainer word.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use patients
- “The number of emergency patients has grown rapidly.”noun
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- patientnoun
- treatmentnoun
- placebonoun
- therapynoun
- chemotherapynoun
- medicationnoun
- diabetesnoun
- surgicaladjective
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.