To commute is to travel regularly between home and work or school. In law, it can also mean to change a punishment to a less severe one.
From Latin *commutare* “to change, exchange,” from *com-* “together” + *mutare* “to change.” The travel meaning grew from the idea of regularly ‘exchanging’ one place for another each day.
Your daily commute is literally a repeated ‘exchange of places’—you trade home for work and then trade back. The legal sense of commuting a sentence is similar: you’re swapping one kind of punishment for another.
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