Omnibus

How to spell omnibus

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce omnibus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does omnibus mean?

1. nounA single volume containing several works, often by one author or in one series.
2. adjectiveComprising or dealing with many items or matters at once.
3. nounA horse-drawn public passenger vehicle of the nineteenth century, the forerunner of the bus.

Omnibus in a sentence

• noun

  The publisher reissued the trilogy as a single omnibus this autumn.

• adjective

  Congress passed an omnibus spending bill covering a dozen departments.

• noun

  The museum displays a restored Victorian omnibus that once ran along the high street.

• noun

  She bought the detective omnibus to get all six novels at a lower price.

• adjective

  The committee approved an omnibus motion that combined all the proposed amendments.

• noun

  Passengers once crowded onto the horse-drawn omnibus to reach the railway station.

Where does omnibus come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is, quite literally, the Latin word omnibus, the dative plural of omnis meaning 'all', so the whole form translates as 'for all'. It entered modern use in France in the 1820s, when a public carriage running a fixed route was advertised as a voiture omnibus, a 'carriage for everyone', and the phrase was soon clipped to the single word omnibus. English borrowed it in the 1820s and 1830s for the same horse-drawn passenger vehicle, and from this the everyday word 'bus' was later shortened off the back of it. Because the vehicle carried all comers, the term broadened to mean anything that gathers many things together, giving us the omnibus edition of a writer's works and the omnibus bill that bundles many measures into one. The unusual ending is the spelling trap: it is not the noun ending '-us' attached to a stem but a genuine Latin case ending, which is why it is omni-bus and never 'omnibous' or 'omnibuss'.

How the word is built

• omni- (all)
• -bus (Latin dative plural ending meaning 'for all')