The word fugacity is derived from the Latin fugere, to flee. In the sense of an "escaping tendency", it was introduced to thermodynamics in 1901 by the American chemist Gilbert N. Lewis and popularized in an influential textbook by Lewis and Merle Randall, Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, in 1923. The "escaping tendency" referred to the flow of matter between phases and played a similar role to that of temperature in heat flow.