COBOL, also known as Common Business Orientated Language, is the second-oldest high-level programming language, FORTAN being the oldest.

COBOL was created in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a method of developing business applications for data processing.

COBOL is for business applications that run on large computers. It is an extremely high level programming language, meaning all the commands are practically spelled out in English. This makes programming COLBOL easy, but time consuming. Although most people would call this language 'dead', it is the most used language in the world.