Capitalism was a perjorative used by the aristocracy at the time of the beginning of the industrial revolution. It relates to the word "entrepreneur" which means "to grasp between", the latin "capito" means to grasp.

It has become ordinary these days but the word "capital" did not used to mean the centre of power. The proper spelling is "Capitol" and the actual root of it, also latin, is "Capitoline":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitoline_Hill

Nobody should be surprised to learn that this is where the temple of Satan, I mean Saturn was. Lord of the flies. The symbol of the dove, Columbine, actually, I don't think it was ever dove, but pigeon.

This is just the tip of the iceberg if you want to dig into the linguistic and cultural history of modern words.

I agree, free market is a better word, but even the word free has been poisoned to mean gratis, when it also means liberty, which means, privacy and the right to allocate your resources as you see fit.

The whole point of it can be summed up by Hakek's market information problem. Distributing the decision making puts more brain cells on the task, and always yields a better result than this being done by a two tier society with the owners and the slaves.