PHP is a script language and interpreter that is freely available. PHP, originally derived from Personal Home Page Tools, now stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, which the PHP FAQ describes as a “recursive acronym.”
PHP is an alternative to Microsoft’s Active Server Page (ASP) technology. As with ASP, the PHP script is embedded within a Web page along with its HTML. Before the page is sent to a user that has requested it, the Web server calls PHP to interpret and perform the operations called for in the PHP script.
An HTML page that includes a PHP script is typically given a file name suffix of “.php” “.php3,” or “.phtml”. Like ASP, PHP can be thought of as “dynamic HTML pages,” since content will vary based on the results of interpreting the script
For more information, a good resource is http://php.net/
Content retrieved from: https://support.appliedi.net/kb/a363/what-is-php.aspx.