Commuting

How to spell commuting

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce commuting

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does commuting mean?

1. verbTravelling regularly between home and a place of work or study.
2. verbChanging a legal penalty into one that is less severe.

Commuting in a sentence

• Commuting into the city by train takes her almost two hours each day.

• The governor is considering commuting the prisoner's sentence to time already served.

• After moving to the suburbs, he spends a small fortune on commuting costs.

• The court justified commuting the fine because of the defendant's poor health.

Where does commuting come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb commutare, formed from com-, an intensive prefix meaning 'altogether', and mutare, meaning 'to change'. For centuries it carried the literal sense of exchanging one thing for another, and that meaning still survives in legal language when a judge commutes a sentence into a lighter one. The modern travel sense was born in nineteenth century America, where railways sold a 'commutation ticket', a season pass that changed, or commuted, a string of separate daily fares into a single reduced payment. People who bought these tickets became 'commuters', and the act of making that daily journey became 'commuting'. The double m in the spelling comes straight from the Latin prefix com-, while the single t reflects mutare, which is the same root that gives us 'mutate' and 'mutation'.

How the word is built

• com- (altogether, from Latin)
• mut (change, from mutare)
• -ing (present participle/gerund)