Capitalism Etymologi

The etymology of the word capital has roots in the trade and ownership of animals. The Latin root of the capital is capitalis, from the proto-Indo-European kaput, which means "head", this being how wealth was measured. The terms chattel and cattle itself also derive from this same origin.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, capitalism was first used by novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1854, by which he meant by having ownership of capital. Arthur Young first used the term capitalist of his economic surveys in his work Travels in France (1792). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, used capitalist in his work Table Talk (1823), and Benjamin Disraeli used capitalist in the 1845 work Sybil.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used capitalist is his first work What is Property? (1840) to refer to the owners of capital. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also used capitalist (Kapitalist) as a private owner of capital in The Communist Manifesto (1848), and referred the capitalistic system (kapitalistischen System) to the capitalist mode of production (kapitalistische Produktionsform) in Das Kapital (1867). Marx's notion of the capitalist mode of production is characterised as a system of primarily private ownership of the means of production in a mainly market economy, with a legal framework on commerce and a physical infrastructure provided by the state.
According to the OED, Carl Adolph Douai, a German-American socialist and abolitionist, used private capitalism in 1863. A work entitled Better Times (1877) and an unknown author in 1884 of the Pall Mall Gazette also used capitalism.
However, the first use of capitalism to describe the production system was the German economist Werner Sombart, in his 1902 book The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben). Sombart's close friend and colleague, Max Weber, also used capitalism in his 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus).
(wikipedia)