What does cursor mean?

In database packages, the term cursor refers to a control structure for the successive traversal (and potential processing) of records in a result set. A cursor is used for processing individual rows returned by the database system for a query. It is necessary because many programming languages suffer from impedance mismatch. Programming languages are often procedural and do not offer any mechanism for manipulating whole result sets at once. Therefore, the rows in a result set must be processed sequentially by the application. In this way, a cursor can be thought of as an iterator over the collection of rows in the result set.