What is a Permalink?

Permalink is a portmanteau of permanent link because it's just that, a link to a specific post or page that will not change and will not suffer link death. By default, a WordPress permalink looks like this:
http://www.example.com/?p=14
This it the "permanent link" to a particular post on your site. It'll always be there so long as you don't delete it. Obviously, you want to swap out the 14 for your post ID and example.com with your domain.
A permalink is meant to be permanent because it will always point to a specific item of content, never changing. Whereas the homepage and different archive pages will change as new content is posted, the permanent link will always access the post or page that is defined in it's body. These are handled in different ways and some CMSes, like MediaWiki, have a timestamp in their permalink so when the wiki's page is edited, the permalink still links to the version at the time it was created.
However, http://www.example.com/?p=14 isn't what we'd call "human-readable" because, unless you know your entire database of posts and each one's associated ID, you can't interpret what it means other than it points to some post on that domain. So, WordPress has a solution in the form of "pretty" URLs that can easily be interpreted by a regular ol' human.

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