Tags are letters or words between two brackets, like this:

<tag>

There are a whole bunch of these tags, and learning HTML pretty much means learning all the various tags.

Each tag does a different thing. For example, there's one that will make your text bigger, another that will center it on the page, and another that will create a link somewhere else. So what you do is pick the tag that you want to use, then put it right in front of the word that you want to change. This tells the browser that it's supposed to do something there.

Let's say you want the word "television" to be boldfaced. Bold text is used to emphasize words, and "penquin" is the most important word on your page. Well, you need to tell the Web browser that you want "television" in bold, so you use the bold tag, which looks like this:

"B" stands for "bold." Most tags use abbreviations like this, making them pretty easy to remember. So the tag is telling the browser, "Look, I want everything after me to be in boldface." The Web browser does what it's told and makes the word bold.