The word meant to exchange one thing for another, until daily fare tickets exchanged it for something else entirely.
The Latin commutare meant to change altogether, from com- (together, intensively) and mutare (to change). When the word entered Middle English in the fifteenth century, it meant to transform or exchange one thing for another.1
By the 1630s, commute had acquired a legal meaning: to substitute a less severe punishment for a harsher one, exchanging a death sentence for imprisonment. The word still carried its original Latin sense of transformation through exchange.2
The connection to daily travel emerged from a financial transaction. In the 1820s, American ferry lines and railroads began selling "commutation tickets," discounted passes that allowed the holder to combine multiple daily fares into a single upfront payment. The earliest known use of "commuters" in this context appeared in a notice in The Long-Island Star on May 2, 1822, requesting that "commuters" not purchase their tickets until after a public meeting about ferry services.3
By the 1860s, commuter referred to anyone who held such a ticket. By 1889, commute had become a verb meaning to travel back and forth between home and work. The noun commute, describing the journey itself, is attested from 1960.4
The U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey reports that in 2022, the average one-way commute for American workers was 27.6 minutes. Approximately 76 percent of workers drove alone.5 A Latin word that meant total transformation now describes the daily repetition of the same journey, the most unchanging part of the working day.