In 1943 Erwin Schrödinger used the concept of “negative entropy” in his popular-science book What is life?. Later, Léon Brillouin shortened the expression to a single word, negentropy. Schrödinger introduced the concept when explaining that a living system exports entropy in order to maintain its own entropy at a low level (see entropy and life). By using the term negentropy, he could express this fact in a more "positive" way: a living system imports negentropy and stores it.

In a note to What is Life? Schrödinger explains his usage of this term. "Let me say first, that if I had been catering for them [physicists] alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. It is the more familiar notion in this context. But this highly technical term seemed linguistically too near to energy for making the average reader alive to the contrast between the two things.”

In 1974, Albert Szent-Györgyi proposed replacing the term negentropy with syntropy, a term which may have originated in the 1940s with the Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappiè, who attempted to construct a unified theory of the biological and physical worlds. (This attempt has not gained renown or borne great fruit.) Buckminster Fuller attempted to popularize this usage, though negentropy still remains common.