in full Common Business-Oriented Language.
High-level computer programming language , one of the first widely used languages and for many years the most popular language in the business community.
It developed from the 1959 Conference on Data Systems Languages, a joint initiative between the U.S. government and the private sector. COBOL was created to fulfill two major objectives: portability (ability of programs to be run with minimum modification on computers from different manufacturers) and readability (ease with which a program can be read like ordinary English). It ceased to be widely used in the 1990s.