Noun

(en noun)

(obsolete) A passing from one state to another; change; alteration; mutation.

(obsolete) The act of giving one thing for another; barter; exchange.

Substitution of one thing for another; interchange.

Specifically, the substitution of one kind of payment for another, especially a switch to monetary payment from obligations of labour.

* 1969 , Philip Ziegler, The Black Death , Folio Society 2006, p. 213:

Professor Postan has argued in favour of a rapid move towards commutation in the twelfth century which slackened or even went into reverse in the course of the thirteenth.

(legal) The change to a lesser penalty or punishment by the State

* 1992 , Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety , Harper Perennial 2007, p. 23:

Monsieur the Marquis de Sade [was] now holed up in one of his châteaux while his wife worked for the commutation of a sentence passed on him recently for poisoning and buggery.

(linguistics) Substitution, as a means of discriminating between phonemes.

(electronics) The reversal of an electric current.

Noun

(en noun)

An instance of moving to live in another place for a while.

Seasonal moving for animals, birds or fishes to breed or find a new home.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-01-01

, author=Paul Bartel, Ashli Moore , title=Avian Migration: The Ultimate Red-Eye Flight , volume=101, issue=1, page=47–48 , magazine= citation , passage=Many of these classic methods are still used, with some modern improvements. For example, with the aid of special microphones and automated sound detection software, ornithologists recently reported […] that pine siskins (Spinus pinus ) undergo an irregular, nomadic type of nocturnal migration .}}

Movement in general.

The migration of lead from a can to the food inside it can cause lead poisoning.

(computing) Instance of changing a platform from an environment to another one.