Haskellers are usually familiar with monoids. A monoid has an appending operation <> or mappend and an identity element mempty. A Semigroup has an append <>, but does not require an mempty element. A Monoid can be made a Semigroup with just instance Semigroup MyMonoid
More formally, a semigroup is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with an associative binary operation. A semigroup generalizes a monoid in that there might not exist an identity element. It also (originally) generalized a group (a monoid with all inverses) to a type where every element did not have to have an inverse, thus the name semigroup.
Data.Semigroup and Data.List.NonEmpty were added to base as of 4.9.0.0. This package now offers a backwards-compatible API and some tools for deriving semigroups with generics.
Contributions and bug reports are welcome!
Please feel free to contact me through github or on the #haskell IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.
-Edward Kmett