Tooltip

The tooltip is a common graphical user interface element. It is used in conjunction with a cursor, usually a mouse pointer. The user hovers the cursor over an item, without clicking it, and a small box appears with the name or description of the item being hovered over. A common variant, especially in older software, is displaying the description of the tool in a status bar, but such descriptions are not usually called tooltips.

A good example of a tooltip is the Wikipedia logo on the upper left. For many graphical web browsers, hovering the mouse pointer over it for several seconds will cause a "[Main Page]" tooltip to appear.