The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) was developed to describe phenotypic abnormalities, aka, “deep phenotyping”, whereby symptoms and characteristic phenotypic findings (a phenotypic profile) are captured. The HPO has been utilized to great success for assisting computational phenotype comparison against known diseases, other patients, and model organisms to support diagnosis of rare disease patients. Clinicians and geneticists create phenotypic profiles based on clinical evaluation, but this is time consuming and can miss important phenotypic features. Patients are sometimes the best source of information about their symptoms that might otherwise be missed in a clinical encounter. However, HPO primarily use medical terminology, which can be difficult for patients and their families to understand. To make the HPO accessible to patients, we systematically added non-expert terminology (i.e., layperson terms) synonyms. Using semantic similarity, patient-recorded phenotypic profiles can be evaluated against those created clinically for undiagnosed patients to determine the improvement gained from the patient-driven phenotyping, as well as how much the patient phenotyping narrows the diagnosis. This patient-centric HPO can be utilized by all: in patient-centered rare disease websites, in patient community platforms and registries, or even to post one’s hard-to-diagnosed phenotypic profile on the Web.