Page "Surjective function" Paragraph 2

The term surjective and the related terms injective and bijective were introduced by Nicolas Bourbaki, a group of mainly French 20th-century mathematicians who wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935.

The French prefix sur means over or above and relates to the fact that the image of the domain of a surjective function completely covers the function's codomain.