2702: 'Bus' comes from ¾ of a Latin Ending May 14, 2024

When it comes to motor vehicles, lots of words have been abbreviated to form used today, but not in the same ways. The word 'auto' common in many languages is shorted from automobile, but the prefix 'auto-' is common enough and stands on its own as a morpheme at least. In the case of 'bus' however, this is from omnibus which is a Latin word meaning “for all”, as the dative plural form of omnis (“every; all”). In shortening it, not only was the word abbreviated, but it implies the root is made of “omni-” plus “-bus” but the suffix in Latin is “-ibus”, and unlike say “auto + mobile”, “omn(i)-” would anyway not stand on its own, at least not with the same meaning. 

Later, words like “autobus” emerged to refer to mechanical omnibusses (no sensible plural would exist using just Latin morphology), but by this point it had lost any originally intended meaning it might have had.