I am fine-tuning a short note on basic category theory; any such course must introduce monads, and I want to give a bit of history of the subject.


I soon realized that I don't know the precise series of events that led Mac Lane to create the name "monad" instead of the less creative "triple" or "standard construction". Did he coin the term, or did he simply advertize it?


The only reference I can find is a [link](https://web.archive.org/web/20150326175332/http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/225/match=) at the [nLab page](https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/monad).



When were triples called monads for the first time?
This is covered in [this English.SE question](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30654/where-does-the-term-monad-come-from). In short, people were not all very happy about the term "triple", and tried to come up with something better. Jean Bénabou suggested "monad" during lunch at a meeting in 1966, and it was quickly adopted; for example, it appears in the titles of Anders Kock's and Eduardo Dubuc's theses from 1967 and 1969 respectively, and the use of the term is alluded to in the Introduction of the "Seminar on triples and categorical homology theory" from 1969 and in Lawvere's "Ordinal sums and equational doctrines" from that volume. Peter May also convinced Mac Lane to use "monad" in his book, which helped to popularize the term.


