The story
- Ancient Greek · derived fromἀντωνυμία“pronoun”
- French · borrowed fromantonyme
- English todayantonym
From French antonyme (1840s and 1850s), which was modeled on earlier synonyme and influenced by the etymons of Ancient Greek ἀντωνυμία (antōnumía, “pronoun”); credit for popularization of the French loanword's naturalization into English is given principally to Charles John Smith and his 1867 book Synonyms and Antonyms: Or, Kindred Words and Their Opposites. Collected and Contrasted. By surface analysis, ant- + -onym.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.