A term coined by Ted Nelson around 1965 for a collection of documents (or "nodes") containing cross-references or "links" which, with the aid of an interactive browser program, allow the reader to move easily from one document to another.

The extension of hypertext to include other media - sound, graphics, and video - has been termed "hypermedia", but is usually just called "hypertext", especially since the advent of the World-Wide Web and HTML.