Counting heads of cattle gave Latin the root word for the modern economic system.
The Latin word caput meant head. In medieval Europe, capitale described the principal sum of a money loan, the head portion that a lender expected returned before any interest.1 By the thirteenth century, Italian merchants were using it to refer to the assets of a trading firm.
The connection between heads and wealth ran deeper than metaphor. Livestock was counted by the head, and the same Proto-Indo-European root that produced caput also produced the English words cattle and chattel.2
The word capitalist appeared in French during the Revolution, around 1791, as a term of reproach for men of large property.3 The abstract noun capitalism entered English later. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first appearance to Thackeray's novel The Newcomes in 1854, where it simply meant having ownership of capital.4
Louis Blanc used the French form in 1850 to describe a system in which capital is appropriated by some to the exclusion of others. Karl Marx referred extensively to capital and the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital (1867), yet rarely used the word capitalism itself.5
Adam Smith, widely regarded as the intellectual architect of free-market thinking, never used the term. He called his preferred arrangement the system of natural liberty.6
J.L. Garvin, writing the entry for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929, observed that the word had come into general use only in the second half of the nineteenth century, signifying private enterprise free to seek profit by employing the mass of human labor for wages.7