Generally, any text that contains links to other documents - words or phrases in the document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be retrieved and displayed.

Inside the hypertext system you can move from one object to another even though they might have very different forms. For example, while reading a document about Mozart, you might click on the phrase Violin Concerto in A Major, which could display the written score or perhaps even invoke a recording of the concerto. Clicking on the name Mozart might cause various illustrations of Mozart to appear on the screen. The icons that you select to view associated objects are called Hypertext links or buttons.

The term was coined by Ted Nelson to refer to a nonlinear system of information browsing and retrieval based on associative links between documents.

Hypertext systems are particularly useful for organizing and browsing through large databases that consist of disparate types of information. The World Wide Web is organized as a hypertext system and uses hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to link pages and multimedia files.