Lifting is more of a design pattern than a mathematical concept (although I expect someone around here will now refute me by showing how lifts are a category or something).

Typically you have some data type with a parameter. Something like

data Foo a = Foo { ...stuff here ...}

Suppose you find that a lot of uses of Foo take numeric types ( Int , Double etc) and you keep having to write code that unwraps these numbers, adds or multiplies them, and then wraps them back up. You can short-circuit this by writing the unwrap-and-wrap code once. This function is traditionally called a "lift" because it looks like this:

liftFoo2 :: (a -> b -> c) -> Foo a -> Foo b -> Foo c

In other words you have a function which takes a two-argument function (such as the (+) operator) and turns it into the equivalent function for Foos.

So now you can write

addFoo = liftFoo2 (+)

Edit: more information

You can of course have liftFoo3 , liftFoo4 and so on. However this is often not necessary.

Start with the observation

liftFoo1 :: (a -> b) -> Foo a -> Foo b

But that is exactly the same as fmap . So rather than liftFoo1 you would write

instance Functor Foo where fmap f foo = ...

If you really want complete regularity you can then say

liftFoo1 = fmap

If you can make Foo into a functor, perhaps you can make it an applicative functor. In fact, if you can write liftFoo2 then the applicative instance looks like this:

import Control.Applicative instance Applicative Foo where pure x = Foo $ ... -- Wrap 'x' inside a Foo. (<*>) = liftFoo2 ($)

The (<*>) operator for Foo has the type

(<*>) :: Foo (a -> b) -> Foo a -> Foo b

It applies the wrapped function to the wrapped value. So if you can implement liftFoo2 then you can write this in terms of it. Or you can implement it directly and not bother with liftFoo2 , because the Control.Applicative module includes

liftA2 :: Applicative f => (a -> b -> c) -> f a -> f b -> f c

and likewise there are liftA and liftA3 . But you don't actually use them very often because there is another operator

(<$>) = fmap

This lets you write:

result = myFunction <$> arg1 <*> arg2 <*> arg3 <*> arg4