Commuter

How to spell commuter

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce commuter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does commuter mean?

1. nounA person who travels a regular distance between home and work, typically each weekday.

Commuter in a sentence

• The early train was packed with every weary commuter heading into the city.

• As a daily commuter, she spends nearly two hours on the motorway.

Where does commuter come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Commuter grew out of the verb 'commute', which traces back to the Latin commutare, meaning 'to change altogether' or 'to exchange', built from the intensive prefix com- and mutare 'to change' (the same root that gives us 'mutate' and 'mutual'). In nineteenth-century American railways, a 'commutation ticket' was one where many separate daily fares were exchanged, or commuted, into a single reduced season ticket. A person who travelled on such a ticket became known as a 'commuter' by the 1860s. From that financial sense of swapping one form of payment for another, the word broadened to mean anyone who travels a regular distance to and from work. The buried Latin idea of 'changing' is a useful spelling cue: the double m comes from com- meeting the m of mut, and the ending is the agent suffix -er, not -or.

How the word is built

• com- (altogether, intensive)
• mut (from Latin mutare: to change)
• -er (one who does)