'atenism' originates from Ancient Egyptian, specifically the name 'jtn' (transliterated 'Aten'), where 'jtn' referred to 'the disk' (the sun disk), combined with the suffix '-ism' from Greek '-ismos', meaning 'belief' or 'practice'.

'atenism' was formed in modern scholarly English by combining the proper name 'Aten' (from Ancient Egyptian 'jtn', known through classical and later Egyptological sources) with the Greek-derived suffix '-ism'; the term entered academic usage in the 19th and early 20th centuries to describe Akhenaten's religious reforms.

Initially it referred specifically to the worship or cult of the god Aten; over time it has come to denote both the historical religious system instituted under Akhenaten and, more broadly, scholarly descriptions of that monotheistic tendency in the Amarna period.