A Uniform Resource Locator, URL (typically pronounced as a spelled-out initialism, but syllabized by some as 'earl'), or (less formally) Web address, is a sequence of characters, conforming to a standardized format, that is used for referring to resources, such as documents and images on the Internet, by their location.

The URL was a fundamental innovation in the history of the Internet. It was first created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 to allow document authors to establish hyperlinks on the World Wide Web. Since 1994, in Internet standards, the URL concept has been subsumed into that of the more general Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), but URL is still a widely used term.