The lightweight styling markup language of GitHub, Reddit, StackExchange, Notion, and so many others.

Markdown is a lightweight styling language. It allows you to style your text without taking your hands off the keyboard. It encodes the basic styles into the text, but does so in a way that keeps the text very readable, unlike other markup languages (looking at you, Hypertext Markup Language).

It’s de facto standard is CommonMark.

Examples from Memory

# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3 (... up to 6 I think)
Regular line of text.
 
New paragraph, separated by a blank 
line from the text above.
 
--- 
Horizontal rule
 
*italic* and **bold**
 
* list
* of
* bullets
 
1. List
2. Of
3. Numbers
 
> Quote
 
[link to a page](http://www.google.com)
![image embed](http://www.imgur.com/whatever.jpg)
 
For GitHub & Notion, at least:
- [ ] To do
- [x] Completed to do

Source