Anchor tags (<A> </A>) are placed around a word, phrase, or image in a document to make it (the word, etc.) a highlighted, clickable link to another document or multi-media object, another section of the current document, or even to a particular section of another document.

The link you clicked on to get to this page was created by an anchor with an HREF (Hypertext Reference), which looked like this:

<A HREF="http://www.webcom.com/glossary/anchor.shtml">anchor</A>

Everything between the quotes after the HREF= is the URL of this page. (Note: if you linked to this page from another page in the glossary, the full URL was not necessary, so the anchor probably actually looked like this:

<A HREF="anchor.shtml>anchor"</A>

whereas the former URL would be required to link from a totally different server to this page, to link from one document to another location on the same server, the full URL is optional).

In each of the above example anchors, the browser would only display the word "anchor" on the page, highlighted to inform the user that it was a link. If the user clicked on that link, they'd be shown this page.