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When diving deeper into Scala I hit the term type class.
It had been confusing because a class is a type and a type could
be a class in Scala and “type” and “class” are in itself abstract terms.
After reading some examples I got a feeling what a type class could
be, but maybe there is an easier approach to get a mental hook
(picture, concept) to what a type class is by explaining why it had
been named like that.
In Haskell there are no classes in Java/Scala sense, so this term was free to be used (in the sense “class of types”, as Johannes Weiß says).
It isn’t used in official Scala documentation, but people coming from Haskell found they could emulate Haskell type classes in Scala and reused the name.