English Explanatory Dictionary

entropy

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A measure of the disorder present in a system.
  2. A measure of the disorder directly proportional to the natural logarithm of the number of microstates yielding an equivalent thermodynamic macrostate.
  3. Shannon entropy
  4. A measure of the amount of energy in a physical system that cannot be used to do work.
  5. The capacity factor for thermal energy that is hidden with respect to temperature.
  6. The dispersal of energy; how much energy is spread out in a process, or how widely spread out it becomes, at a specific temperature.
  7. A measure of the amount of information and noise present in a signal.
  8. The tendency of a system that is left to itself to descend into chaos.

Pronunciation

/ˈɛntɹəpi/ en-us-entropy.ogg

Word forms

entropy entropies

Etymology

First attested in 1867, as the translation of German Entropie, coined in 1865 by Rudolph Clausius in analogy to Energie (“energy”), replacing the root of Ancient Greek ἔργον (érgon, “work”) by Ancient Greek τροπή (tropḗ, “transformation”)).

Synonyms

anergy bound entropy disgregation unavailable energy

Antonyms

aggregation exergy free entropy negentropy syntropy

Related words

chaos mul:S

Derived words

algorithmic entropy anentropy conditional entropy correntropy disentropy entropic entropized entropology entropyless entropylike extropy high-entropy alloy hyperentropy information entropy joint entropy min-entropy negentropy Rényi entropy Shannon entropy subentropy Tsallis entropy von Neumann entropy
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