socket or sockets

A method for communication between a client program and a server program in a network. A socket is defined as the endpoint in a connection. Sockets are created and used with a set of programming requests or "function calls," sometimes called the sockets application programming interface (API).

A socket is also an Internet address, combining an IP address (the four-part numerical address that uniquely identifies a particular computer on the Internet) and a port number (the number that identifies a particular Internet application, such as FTP, Gopher, or WWW).