Origins
The verb 'commit' entered English in the fourteenth century from Latin 'committere,' a compound of 'com-' (together, with) and 'mittere' (to send, to let go). The literal sense is 'to send together' or 'to bring together,' which generated a remarkably wide range of meanings in both Latin and English.
In Classical Latin, 'committere' had several distinct senses, all flowing from the core image of joining or connecting: to bring together in combat ('committere proelium' — to join battle), to entrust ('committere alicui' — to entrust to someone), to perpetrate or do ('committere facinus' — to commit a crime), and to connect or combine. English inherited all of these senses, though their relative prominence has shifted over the centuries.
The word belongs to the vast family descended from Latin 'mittere,' one of the most productive source-verbs in English. The prefix 'com-' (together) distinguishes 'commit' from its siblings: 'admit' (send toward), 'dismiss' (send away), 'emit' (send out), 'omit' (send past), 'permit' (send through), 'remit' (send back), 'submit' (send under), and 'transmit' (send across). The past participle 'commissus' (sent together, entrusted) gave English the noun 'commission' (an entrusting of authority) and 'committee' (a body to which matters are committed or entrusted).
Latin Roots
The three main modern senses of 'commit' in English each reflect a different facet of the Latin original. First, 'to commit a crime' (perpetrate, carry out) preserves the Latin sense of joining oneself to an act — committing is, etymologically, throwing oneself together with the deed. Second, 'to commit to a cause' or 'to make a commitment' extends the Latin sense of entrusting: one entrusts oneself to the cause, binds oneself to it. Third, 'to commit someone to prison' or 'to commit a patient to hospital' preserves the sense of consigning or entrusting a person to an institution's care.
The noun 'commitment' appeared in English in the seventeenth century and has become one of the central concepts of modern personal and professional life. 'Commitment issues,' 'committed relationship,' 'fully committed' — these phrases reflect a culture that values dedication and reliability while acknowledging the psychological difficulty of binding oneself irrevocably. The word captures a tension between freedom and obligation that is characteristic of modernity.
In parliamentary and legislative procedure, 'to commit a bill' means to refer it to a committee for detailed examination — a usage that directly echoes the Latin sense of entrusting a matter to a body for its care. The word 'committee' itself is the past participle of 'commit' used substantively: a committee is, etymologically, a person or group to whom something has been committed.
Later Development
In computing and software engineering, 'commit' has acquired a precise technical meaning since the 1970s. In version control systems like Git, 'to commit' means to save a set of changes to a repository, creating a permanent record. This usage preserves the Latin sense of 'entrusting to safekeeping' with remarkable fidelity: one commits code to a repository as one might commit valuables to a vault. The 'commit message' — a brief description accompanying each commit — has become a minor literary genre in software culture, ranging from meticulous documentation to the legendary (and discouraged) 'fix stuff.'
In database systems, a 'commit' finalizes a transaction, making all changes permanent. The opposite operation is a 'rollback,' which undoes uncommitted changes. This technical usage highlights the element of irrevocability in 'commit' — once committed, the action cannot easily be undone, whether in databases, in law, or in life.
The word's phonology has been stable since its adoption: stress on the second syllable (/kəˈmɪt/), with the expected doubling of the final consonant before suffixes ('committed,' 'committing,' 'committal'). Unlike some Latin-derived words that show a stress shift between noun and verb forms, 'commit' maintains second-syllable stress as a verb, while its nouns ('commission,' 'committee,' 'commitment') have their own stress patterns determined by their suffixes.