In functional programming, monads are a way to structure computations as a sequence of steps, where each step not only produces a value but also some extra information about the computation, such as a potential failure, non-determinism, or side effect. More formally, a monad is a type constructor M equipped with two operations, which lifts a value into the monadic context, and which chains monadic computations. In simpler terms, monads can be thought of as interfaces implemented on type constructors, that allow for functions to abstract over various type constructor variants that implement monad (e.g. , , etc.).
Both the concept of a monad and the term originally come from category theory, where a monad is defined as an endofunctor with additional structure.