The word ion was coined from neuter present participle of 
Greek ἰέναι (ienai), meaning "to go". A cation is something that moves down (, kato, meaning "down") and an anion is something that moves up (, ano, meaning "up"). They are so called because ions move toward the electrode of opposite charge. This term was introduced (after a suggestion by the English polymath William Whewell) by English physicist and chemist Michael Faraday in 1834 for the then-unknown species that goes from one electrode to the other through an aqueous medium. Faraday did not know the nature of these species, but he knew that since metals dissolved into and entered a solution at one electrode and new metal came forth from a solution at the other electrode; that some kind of substance has moved through the solution in a current. This conveys matter from one place to the other. In correspondence with Faraday, Whewell also coined the words anode and cathode, as well as anion and cation as ions that are attracted to the respective electrodes.
Svante Arrhenius put forth, in his 1884 dissertation, the explanation of the fact that solid crystalline salts dissociate into paired charged particles when dissolved, for which he would win the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Arrhenius explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into Faradays ions, he proposed that ions formed even in the absence of an electric current.