Origins
The word 'antibiotic' was coined at a precise historical moment: 1942, by the microbiologist Selman Waksman, to describe the class of chemical weapons that microorganisms deploy against each other and that medicine had learned to harvest for human benefit. The word itself, from Greek 'anti' (against) and 'bios' (life), encodes a biological paradox — this is a substance that works against life in order to serve it.
The concept it named, however, was older. In 1877, Louis Pasteur and Jules Joubert observed that one microorganism could inhibit the growth of another. In 1889, the French physician Pierre Vuillemin coined the word 'antibiose' to describe organisms that kill others to survive — the term 'antibiosis,' denoting the relationship itself, predates 'antibiotic' by fifty years. But the era of antibiotic medicine began with Alexander Fleming's 1928 observation that Penicillium mold was killing bacteria on his culture plates — a discovery that led, after a decade of development by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, to the mass production of penicillin during World War II. It was in this context that Waksman, who discovered streptomycin in 1943, needed a general term for these bacterial-killing substances, and 'antibiotic' was his coinage.
The Greek 'bios' (βίος, life, mode of life) belongs to PIE *gʷeyh₃- (to live), a root with remarkable productivity across the family. In Latin, it became 'vīvere' (to live), producing 'vital,' 'vivid,' 'revive,' 'vivacious,' 'convivial,' 'victual,' and 'vitamin' (originally 'vitamine,' life-amine). In Greek, 'bios' produced 'biology' (study of life), 'biography' (life-writing), 'biopsy' (seeing living tissue), and many more. In Germanic languages, the root became Old English 'cwic' (alive, living) — Modern English 'quick,' which in its original sense meant alive, not fast. 'The quick and the dead' in the Apostles' Creed means the living and the dead. 'Quicksilver' is mercury, the living metal, because it flows. A 'quickset hedge' is a hedge of living plants. The Old English sense survives in these fossilized compounds even as the free adjective 'quick' shifted entirely to mean rapid.
Greek Origins
The prefix 'anti-' (Greek ἀντί, against, opposite, instead of) is ubiquitous in English scientific and political vocabulary: 'antidote' (given against poison), 'antipathy' (feeling against), 'antipodes' (opposite feet, the other side of the globe), 'Antarctic' (opposite the Arctic), 'antibody,' 'antivirus,' 'antidepressant.'
The development of antibiotic resistance — bacteria evolving mechanisms to defeat the substances evolved to defeat them — is the great medical challenge of the twenty-first century. The word 'antibiotic,' which names a weapon, now implicitly names an arms race as old as microbial life itself. What Waksman named in 1942 is not a solution but an ongoing contest between life and the things that destroy it.