Other forms: committed, committing, commits
To commit is to bind yourself to something and give up the way out. You commit to a plan, commit to two years of evening classes, commit yourself before you know how hard it will be.
The other everyday use is crime: you commit a crime, commit fraud, commit an offence. One verb, two opposite feelings — a promise on one side, a wrong done on the other. Committed is the adjective, and about people it is a compliment: a committed teacher, a committed couple. You also commit something to memory or commit it to paper, meaning you hand it over to be kept. Programmers commit code, saving a set of changes into the project's history, and a commit is that saved lump of work. The noun for the promise is commitment, with two Ms and two Ts.
1verbcommitTo promise yourself firmly to a course of action, so that you cannot easily withdraw.~24%
“She committed to three years in the job before she had seen the office.”
2verbwrongTo do something wrong or illegal.~66%
“He was accused of committing fraud over eleven years.”
3verbhandTo hand something over to be kept or dealt with.~2%
“He committed the whole speech to memory in one evening.”
4verbsaveTo save a set of changes into the record of a software project.~6%
“She committed the fix and pushed it before lunch.”
5nounsavedOne saved set of changes in a software project.~2%
“The bug arrived in a commit from Tuesday afternoon.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin committō was com-, together, plus mittō, to send — to send things together, to join, to entrust. Middle English committen carried the whole spread across, which is why one English verb still commits crimes, commits to promises and commits words to memory. That mittō is the same one standing inside mission.
Middle English
committen
English, today
commit
Built from
From Middle English committen. Middle English committen, itself borrowed from Latin committō (“to bring together, join, compare, commit (a wrong), incur, give in charge, etc.”), from com- (“together”) + mittō (“to send”). See mission.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA