The meaning of Class

Classes are descriptions of a "classification" of objects in your program.

The terminology is analagous to biological classification. Where Plato would classify any "featherless biped" as a human¹, a String is classified by the set of things you can do to it and the data it stores. The String class would specify all of that.²

1. What an idiot ↩

2. If that's a bit too heady of an explanation don't fret. You will likely get it intuitively eventually. There are like 50 different ways to explain it and eventually one will land for you. ↩