Query
A query may refer to any of the following:
1. In general, the term query describes a question or request made by a user or another computer or device. For example, with a search engine (e.g., Google), the text you enter is considered the search query or search text and each word is known as a keyword.
2. With a database or search, a query is a field or option used to locate information within a database or another location. For example, you could query a database to find all related tables that match the state of "Utah" in the United States. The database could then return all people logged in the database that live in Utah.
The action of performing a query is querying. For example, when looking something up in a database, you're querying the database.