DNS is the software on the Internet that allows us to use words fro web sites instead of numbers
DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System. There are several layers to how DNS works. It converts the website names to the IP address (looks like 192.168.1.1) and the Internet uses the number address to actually send and request the information.
When you type a web page name in the address bar, for example www.dwightwatt.com, DNS looks that name up in a table on your computer, called .host, and see if it knows about it. If it does the browser, could be IE or Firefox, then uses that address to send the request for the website. If it is not in the .host table the computer then sends a request to the DNS address in network connection for your computer, for instance 205.152.144.23 If the site name was not found there it sends the request to the DNS server that serves it, meaning one higher up the chain. The address it will find eventually for www.dwightwatt.com is 208.109.14.;136
Ultimately after several checks the request ends up at one of the 13 root DNS servers. These servers keep up with all registered domain names and their IP addresses. It is seldom a request from your machine will make its way to a root server as each machine involved in a request remembers the requests and the addresses returned and usually people go to the same web sites as their neighbors and themselves.