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Commute Was Not a Noun Until 1960

David Levinson ruminates on the origins of the word “commute.” Like the word “traffic,” it seems to have had a strictly commercial orientation (to commute money at a currency exchange) originally, but then expanded to include the flow of people, not just goods.

I hadn’t seen this bit of E.B. White verse:

One who spends his life

In riding to and from his wife;

A man who shaves and takes a train,

And then rides back to shave again.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 4th, 2009 at 7:53 am and is filed under Traffic Wonkery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Commute Was Not a Noun Until 1960”

  1. Donald Says:
    June 4th, 2009 at 9:19 am

    From etymonline.com…
    c.1450, from L. commutare “to often change, to change altogether,” from com- intensive prefix + mutare “to change” (see mutable). Sense of “make less severe” is 1633. Sense of “go back and forth to work” is 1889, from commutation ticket “season pass” (on a railroad, streetcar line, etc.), from commute in its sense of “to change one kind of payment into another” (1795), especially “to combine a number of payments into a single one;” commuter is from 1865; the noun commute is from 1960.

    Correct, it wasn’t a noun, but it did have to do with traveling as early as 1889. Since I’m a math major, I have to wonder how early it was used to describe the mathematical property…

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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