USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, a standardized way to connect electronic devices to computers and power sources. Those rectangular ports on many laptops or the charging cable for your tablet? Those use USB technology.

Before USB became common in the late 1990s, connecting a printer, keyboard, or mouse to a computer meant dealing with different types of plugs and ports for each device. USB simplified everything by creating one standard connection that could work for many things: transferring files from a camera, charging a phone, connecting a game controller, or plugging in a keyboard.

The “universal” part is important. USB cables and ports can work across different brands and devices, so you don't always need a special cable for each brand (though companies sometimes use their own variations). The “serial bus” part is technical language describing how data travels through the cable as a series of signals.

When someone says “plug it into the USB port” or “use a USB cable,” they mean use this standardized connection system. Over time, USB has evolved into different shapes, like the rectangular USB-A, the smaller USB-C, and the tiny micro-USB. But they all share the same basic purpose of connecting devices simply and reliably.