monad

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   An ultimate atom, or simple, unextended point; something ultimate and indivisible.

   Hence Leibnitz, who looked upon things as noumena, after denying them everything like external relation, and therefore also composition or combination, declared that all substances, even the component parts of matter, were simple substances with powers of representation, in one word, monads.

2. 2
   noun

   A data type which represents a specific form of computation, along with the operations "return" and "bind".

   The properties that make the Maybe type a monad are its type constructor Maybe a, our chaining function (>>?), and the injector function Just.

3. 3
   noun

   (biology) a single-celled microorganism (especially a flagellate protozoan)

4. 4
   noun

   a singular metaphysical entity from which material properties are said to derive

From Latin monas (“unit”) (from Ancient Greek μονάς (monás), from μόνος (mónos), from Proto-Indo-European *men-). By surface analysis, mono- + -ad.

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