At this point in my learning journey, I simply accepted that this function is called pure (both in Haskell and in PureScript), but it would have helped a lot if I had known the reasoning behind this name.

Both the Haskell reference and the PureScript docs use the word “lift“,

^Haskell Lift a value into the Structure.

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^PureScript pure can be seen as the function which lifts functions of zero arguments

but lift is already in use (e.g., for monad transformers^{Haskell, Purescript}).

The PureScript reference for pure also uses the word “wrap“, but I understand now why the functor explanations along the lines of “wrap value in a box” can be misleading or miss the point entirely. For these reasons, I do like the name pure as it has no “baggage” and I can focus on understanding the topic without preconceptions.

Books and tutorials using the word “context” helped me understand the more abstract constructs, so I sometimes wondered if using “embed” would make sense here, but then I let it go.

Anyway, I still research from time to time to figure out pure‘s etymology, but did not get any closer yet.