markup language, standard text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. The most widely used markup languages are SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and XML (Extensible Markup Language). The markup symbols can be interpreted by a device (computer, printer, browser, etc.) to control how a document should look when printed or displayed on a monitor. A marked-up document thus contains two types of text: text to be displayed and markup language on how to display it.