Word Stories: commuter

Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

Сommuter – 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.

E. B. White, ‘The Commuter’ (1982)

Although we use the term commuter to refer these days to anyone who travels to and from work, whatever the means of transport, E. B. White puts the emphasis in the right place when he places his commuter on the train. For it was the train that made the life of the commuter possible. The development of regular, scheduled passenger services through the 1830s meant that for the first time one was able to live some distance from one’s employment and still make it to work and back again in a reasonable amount of time. But what about the term, commuter?

It derives from two Latin elements, com- (with, together) and mutare (to change). The second part is also present in words such as mutate, transmute and permutation. The history of the word commute predates the railways by at least two centuries. In the middle of the 17th century it was used to mean ‘exchange or substitute one thing for another’. Hence, money was commuted from one currency to another. It also meant ‘to change an obligation into something less severe’, particularly in the sense of avoiding a duty by paying money. It still survives today in the related sense of replacing a punishment with a less severe one, particularly replacing capital punishment with life imprisonment − e.g. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

The railway connection came in 1842. Season tickets, entitling the holder to a certain number of journeys at a reduced rate, had been available on some railways for about 8 years and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway decided to issue its own. (The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the world’s first intercity railway, having opened in 1830.) They called their season tickets ‘commutation tickets’, since the money paid up front is ‘commuted’ into journeys. Although the term ‘season tickets’ remained (and still remains) the usual term in Britain, the term ‘commutation tickets’ became common in America. Commuter was being used in the USA from the 1860s onwards (as was the term commutation passenger), but it wasn’t until the 1940s that the word was used in Britain without being kept at arm’s length in inverted commas.

If there are any aspects of English words you've always wondered about, drop me a line at [email protected] and I'll see if I can come up with an answer.