Commute

The crucial intermediary was the commutation ticket, first attested in 1822 in a notice in the Long-Island Star requesting that commuters not purchase their tickets until after a public meeting about ferry service. A commutation ticket allowed a traveler to commute, that is, to exchange multiple individual fares for a single discounted payment. The person holding such a ticket became a commuter, not because they traveled, but because they had made a financial exchange.

By the mid-1860s, the word commuter had attached itself to the people rather than the transaction. Railroad suburbanization in the northeastern United States created a new daily pattern: workers living in outlying areas and traveling by rail to urban centers of employment. The commutation ticket made this affordable, and the noun commuter followed the riders, not the tickets. By 1889, commute had become a verb meaning to go back and forth to work.

The commute as a noun, describing the journey itself rather than the act of exchanging fares, did not appear until approximately 1954 according to Merriam-Webster. Within a century, a word that had described a legal or financial exchange had been entirely absorbed into the daily rhythm of industrial employment, describing a journey that, for millions of workers, consumed more waking hours than any activity other than work itself.