A tutorial is talking about cin and cout:
“Syntactically these streams are not used as functions: instead, data are written to streams or read from them using the operators <<, called the insertion operator and >>, called the extraction operator.”
What is a ‘stream’?
Consider a “Stream” as a physical hose, or pipe. At one end, someone may pour some water in. At the other end, it will come out. This is ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ to the stream.
A stream is just a place where data goes. It can be a ‘socket stream’ (over the internet) or a ‘file stream’ (to a file), or perhaps a ‘memory stream’, just data written to a place in-memory (ram).