negentropyn.

1950 L. Brillouin in Amer. Scientist 38 594/1 Every observation in the laboratory..is made at the expense of a certain amount of negative entropy (abbreviation: negentropy), taken away from the surroundings.

1956 L. Brillouin Sci. & Information Theory p. xii We prove that information must be considered as a negative term in the entropy of a system; in short, information is negentropy.

1958 Archivum Linguisticum 10 137 The calculation of redundancy, by the method taken over from information theory, requires the three terms ‘negentropy’, ‘relative negentropy’ and redundancy.

1966 S. Beer Decision & Control ix. 188 Hence the energy transferred through the system is exactly balanced by the information flowing the opposite way; to speak of a change in entropy is ipso facto to speak of an equivalent change in negentropy.

1970 H. C. Shands Semiotic Approaches to Psychiatry xxiii. 386 Knowing systems lose information as physical systems gain entropy. The continuous input of ‘negentropy’..is required to maintain balance in either context.

1987 J. Bu'Lock & B. Kristiansen Basic Biotechnol. iii. 61 A system can only keep its entropy at a value lower than that corresponding to thermodynamic equilibrium by ‘feeding on negentropy’.