commute

C1 · Advanced Law Formal

v. to change a legal punishment to one that is less severe.

v. to substitute a legal penalty or judicial sentence with a less severe one. Transitive; typically used in high-level legal or political contexts.

“The governor decided to commute the prisoner's life sentence to twenty years.”

“The president exercised his executive power to commute the sentences of several non-violent offenders during his final week in office.”

C2 · Proficiency Mathematics Technical

v. in math, when the order of numbers does not change the final result.

v. to satisfy the commutative property, where the order of operands does not affect the result of an operation.

“In basic addition, the numbers commute because two plus three is the same as three plus two.”

“While addition and multiplication of real numbers commute, matrix multiplication generally does not, making the order of operations critical.”

B1 · Intermediate Countable noun

n. the regular trip you make between your home and your work.

n. a regular journey of some distance between one's home and place of work.

“His morning commute is much faster now that he takes the new highway.”

“The city's aging infrastructure has made the daily commute increasingly unreliable for thousands of suburban rail passengers.”