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''commute'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''commute'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260331180822-00-⌔

commute - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Verb

commute (third-person singular simple present commutes, present participle commuting, simple past and past participle commuted)

  • To exchange substantially; to abate but not abolish completely, a penalty, obligation, or payment in return for a great, single thing or an aggregate; to cash in; to lessen
    • ✤ to commute tithes into rentcharges for a sum
    • ✤ to commute market rents for a premium
    • ✤ to commute daily fares for a season ticket
    • (transitive, finance, law) To pay, or arrange to pay, in advance, in a lump sum instead of part by part.
      • ✤ to commute the daily toll for a year’s pass
    • (transitive, law, criminology) To reduce the sentence previously given for a criminal offense.
      • ✤ His prison sentence was commuted to probation.
      • 1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, “THE UTMOST THAT COULD BE OBTAINED WAS THAT HER SENTENCE SHOULD BE COMMUTED FROM BURNING TO BEHEADING.”, in Lady Trevelyan (Hannah More Macaulay), editor, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume V, London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, →OCLC:
      • ✤ Ruslan Kutaev is evidence of this: not only was the elderly man sentenced to four years in prison (later commuted to two months), but he was tortured and his family threatened. This seems to be the price of viewing the world in other than Kadyrovite terms.1
    • (transitive, insurance, pensions) To pay out the lumpsum present value of an annuity, instead of paying in instalments; to cash in; to encash
    • (intransitive, obsolete) To obtain or bargain for exemption or substitution;
      • ✤ He […] thinks it unlawful to commute, and that he is bound to pay his vow in kind.2
  • (intransitive, mathematics) Of an operation, to be commutative, i.e. to have the property that changing the order of the operands does not change the result.
    • ✤ A pair of matrices share the same set of eigenvectors if and only if they commute.
  • (transitive) This term needs a definition. Please help out and add a definition, then remove the text {{rfdef}}.
    • ✤ If you’re hearing me then it means your ego has been commuted successfully into this CAT with zero errors. Only one warning by the way: it may take a moment to acclimatize to being a bodyless ego, but try not to worry too much.3

Noun

commute (plural commutes)

  • A regular journey between two places, typically home and work.
    • ✤ PS: The average commute time in the freewayless City of Vancouver is 27 minutes, while outside of the City of Vancouver the average commute time is 31 minutes.4
  • The route, time or distance of that journey.

Verb

commute (third-person singular simple present commutes, present participle commuting, simple past and past participle commuted)

  • (intransitive, US, UK, Canada) To regularly travel from one’s home to one’s workplace or school, or vice versa.
    • ✤ I commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan by bicycle.
    • ✤ My convention diary is unusually disjointed, since I was mingily commuting from Berkshire rather than pay £65 per night for a single room.5
    • ✤ MRS. PATERSON, a runner and semilapsed vegetarian — she eats meat once a week to fend off anemia — spends weekdays in Manhattan with her son and commutes to Albany most weekends; she and her husband rented out their house in Guilderland, an Albany suburb, and have moved into the Executive Mansion, where she is continuing Ms. Wall Spitzer’s “greening” initiative.6
  • (intransitive, Philippines) To regularly travel from one place to another using public transport.
  • (intransitive) To journey, to make a journey
    • ✤ By one estimate, vultures either residing in or commuting into the Serengeti ecosystem during the annual migration—when 1.3 million white-bearded wildebeests shuffle between Kenya and Tanzania—historically consumed more meat than all mammalian carnivores in the Serengeti combined.7

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /kəˈmjuːt/
    • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (General American, Canada) IPA: /kəˈmjut/
    • Audio (Texas): 🔊
  • (Australian, New Zealand) IPA: /kəˈmjʉːt/
  • Rhymes: -uːt

Etymology 1

Borrowed from Latin commūtō.

Etymology 2

From commutation ticket, a pass on a railroad, streetcar line, etc. that permitted multiple rides over a period of time, e.g. a month, for a single, commuted payment.

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 2018, Dominic Rubin, Russia’s Muslim Heartlands: Islam in the Putin Era, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 207: ↩

  2. 1660, Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience in All Her General Measures; […], volume, London: […] James Flesher, for Richard Royston […], →OCLC: ↩

  3. 2022, MindThunk, Ctrl Alt Ego: ↩

  4. 2012 July 12, Nathan Pachal, “TomTom Congestion Index Useless for Metro Vancouver”, in The South Fraser Blog ‎: ↩

  5. 2005, David Langford, The Sex Column and Other Misprints, page 66: ↩

  6. 2008 June 6, Robin Finn, “No Bed of Roses for a Sudden First Lady”, in The New York Times ‎: ↩

  7. 2015, Elizabeth Royte, Vultures Are Revolting. Here’s Why We Need to Save Them., National Geographic (December 2015) [3]: ↩

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