EB White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, wrote of commuters:

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.

A commuter is of course someone who commutes.

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Commute as a word took the trip into English first in 1633 from Latin commutare but at the time it didn’t have anything to do with traveling. Instead it meant “change,” or perhaps more accurately “exchange.”

The first citation in English according to the OED was for people commuting money at a currency exchange.

We still sometimes hear an “exchange” or “change” meaning used for the word commute when a prisoner has their sentence commuted by a judge. This usually means it’s changed to be a shorter sentence.

The Latin sense of “change” in the word root also shows up also in a word related to commute; mutate.

The word commute first took on a meaning of “traveling back and forth” about 100 years ago. But it wasn’t the exchange of locations that gave commute this new meaning, as might be implied by EB White’s little poem.

In 1848 the American Railroad Journal reported that regular passengers travelling between Trenton and New Brunswick could buy a ticket good for eight train trips along that route.

The special ticket was priced lower than eight individual tickets and was called a commutation ticket. This model was extended to mean “season ticket” for railway passages and the use of commutation was consistent with other senses at the time of fees or taxes that where paid in lieu of some other means of payment.

All this to say, that the original commuters were exchanging their single ticket prices for a better deal, not simply exchanging their place at home for their place at the office twice a day.