synergy
27 March 2026
Words come into and go out of fashion. Sometimes, a particular word will catch a wave of popularity and become overused to the point where it becomes essentially meaningless and nothing more than a buzzword used to show that the speaker is fashionable and up on the latest trends. You often see such words in business writing, as firms indicate through their language that they are leaders in their field by using cutting-edge language. A good example of such a buzzword is synergy.
Synergy is the cumulative effect of coordinated action by a number of independent factors. Anytime you have the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, you have synergy. It is a seventeenth century coinage from the post-classical Latin synergia.
By 1554, the Latin word had been coined, referring to how human will and divine grace together allowed for the forgiveness of sins. English use of the word first appears in this theological sense by 1632. From Edwin Reynolds’s An Explication of the Hundreth and Tenth Psalm:
In the vertue of which synergie and copartnership with Christ and with God, as he saveth, so we save; as he forgiveth sinnes, so we forgive them; as he judgeth wicked men, so wee judge them; as he beseecheth, so we also beseech, saith the Apostle, that you bee reconciled, and receive not the grace of God in vaine. Wee by his Grace, and he by our ministerie.
By 1778, the French physician Paul Joseph Barthez began using synergie in the field of physiology, and by 1831 English had taken up this French sense. From a review of French medical text that appeared in the October 1820 issue of the London Medical and Physical Journal:
This consensus or synergie, (as the author calls this relation of action, after BARTHEZ; and the term is certainly, in this case, more appropriate than sympathy;) between the glottis and the abdominal muscles, is observed in many familiar actions of the human body; and its importance in respect to those actions will be obvious on a little consideration.
Synergy began appearing in in the field of psychology in the late 1950s. From Raymond Cattell’s 1957 Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement:
Morale has often been investigated as if it were a single dimension, but these researches show that it has several distinct causal influences and manifestations. Three of the four most important morale dimensions appear to be dimensions of synergy, i.e., to be tied up with dynamic conditions within the group.
In 1963 a racehorse named Synergy began running in the United States. Slang and buzzwords often make early appearances in the names of racehorses, indicating the term in question is starting to become popular.
And by the mid 1960s synergy was established as a business buzzword. This is clear by its use by Madame Chaing Kai-shek as reported by the Omaha World-Herald of 20 March 1966:
The reporters and others who listened to her Friday might have had trouble understanding her meaning when she tossed such words as “quodilibetical” and “macroeconomics” and “feil” and “synergy” at them.
But they followed her accurately when she said that Mao had “shinnied up” to the top of the Communist “greasy pole.”
Source:
Cattell, Raymond B. Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement. London: George G. Harrap, 1957, 791. Archive.org.
“Critical Analysis.” London Medical and Physical Journal, 44, October 1820, 336. HathiTrust Digital Library.
“Madame Chaing Talk Clear in Five Syllables or Slang.” Sunday World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska), 20 March 1966, 27-A/2–3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, March 2014, s.v. synergy, n., synergia, n.
“Race Results, Entries at Major Tracks.” Miami Herald (Florida), 11 June 1963, 4-C/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Reynolds, Edwin. An Explication of the Hundreth and Tenth Psalm. London: Felix Kyngston for Robert Bostocke, 1632, 173. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.
Image credit: Unknown photographer, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo, but possibly subject to trademark restrictions.
