The name of this metal is one of the curiosities of philology. The
old legend was that Basil Valentine, testing his medicine on some of
his brother monks, killed a few of them. “Those who have ears for
etymological sounds,” says Paris in “Pharmacologia,” “will instantly
recognise the origin of the word antimonachos, or monks-bane.” Another
version of the monk story is to the effect that after Basil Valentine
had been experimenting with antimony in his laboratory he threw some of
his compounds out of the window, and pigs came and ate them. He noticed
that after the purgative action had passed off the pigs fattened. On
this hint he administered the same antimonial preparation to certain
monks who were emaciated by long fasts, and they died through the
violence of the remedy.
These stories were probably the invention of some French punster,
who worked them into shape out of the French name of the substance,
antimoine, which, without the change of a letter, might mean bad for
the monk. Littré entirely demolished any possibility of their truth
by discovering the name in the writings of the Salernitan physician,
Constantine, the African, who lived at the end of the eleventh century,
three or four hundred years before the earliest dates suggested for
Basil Valentine.
Other suggested derivations have been anti-monos, for the reason that
the sulphide was never found alone; anti-menein, in reference to its
tonic properties; and anti-minium, because it was used as an eye
paint in the place of red lead. These are all guesses unsupported by
evidence.
The modern philological theory is that the early Latin stibium and the
late Latin antimonium have the same etymological origin. Stibium was
the Latinised form of the Greek stimmi. Stimmi declined as stimmid--and
this may have found its way into the Arabic through a conjectural
isthimmid to the known Arabic name uthmud, which via athmud and athmoud
became Latinised again into antimonium.