Commuters

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. People who routinely travel back and forth between their residence and place of employment
2. Individuals who frequently make journeys from home to their job and vice versa
3. Individuals who regularly travel daily to their workplace and return to their homes

Etymology: The surprising part is that "commuter" was a ticketing term before it described people. "Commute" comes from Latin "commūtāre", meaning "to change completely" or "exchange", built from "com-" (together) and "mūtāre" (to change). In English, a "commutation ticket" was a bundled or reduced-fare ticket that let a traveller exchange many individual fares for one discounted payment, and the regular users of such tickets came to be called commuters. The noun is formed simply from "commute" plus the agent suffix "-er", which in English denotes a person who performs an action. The sense shifted from the ticket to the traveller who held one, and the word then came to mean anyone making a regular trip between home and work, whether or not they held such a ticket.

Synonyms: travelers, passengers