omnibus [E19th] The 1820s saw the introduction in Paris of a horse-drawn vehicle that carried passengers along a fixed route for a fare. This was called a voiture omnibus, a ‘vehicle for everybody’. When it came to London the vehicle was called simply an omnibus. Though ‘omnibus’ was taken from French, its origin is a Latin form meaning ‘for all’, based on omnis ‘all’, and by the 1830s people had shortened this rather pompous, learned word to bus. In the 1830s an omnibus also came to be a volume containing several works previously published separately. Omnis also gives us words such as omnivorous [M17th] literally ‘all-eating’, and omniscient [L16th] ‘knowing everything’, and omnipotent [ME] ‘all powerful’ and the more recently coined omnishambles for a comprehensively mismanaged situation, coined for the television series The Thick of It in 2009.