Breadcrumbs are used to tell the user of a web site both where they are on the site and the hierarchy above the current location. It is a web page navigational element.
Hansel and Gretel used breadcrumbs to mark their path in the woods in order to the find their way back home in case they got lost. Much like this, breadcrumbs are used to "step you back" in the direction of the home page, up the directory or category structure to the main page of the site.
It wasn't until I started using Drupal as a CMS that I became familiar with the breadcrumb terminology and the Drupal books I read didn't provide a definition.
Breadcrumbs typically look like this (with the current location of the user displayed farthest to the left):
Home -> Category Name -> Article Name
Each one of the entries in the breadcrumb trail are usually hot-linked to the corresponding page.
The current wikipedia article on breadcrumbs describes them in different types. I believe their current description of "Attribute Breadcrumbs" is probably more indicative of the introduction of a tag-breadcrumb hybrid than it does a "type" of breadcrumb, but luckily with the use of Drupal's powerful taxonomy and templating features, you can set up your breadcrumb structure in pretty much any way you can imagine.
There are modules that can help you customize the breadcrumbs if the more advanced features of Drupal aren't at your command yet.
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