A high-level programming language is a programming language that is more user-friendly, to some extent platform-independent, and abstract from low-level computer processor operations such as memory accesses. See programming language for a detailed discussion.
The word "high" does not imply that the language is superior to low-level programming languages but rather refers to the higher level of abstraction from machine language. For example: the difference between the programming language Java and assembler language is that Java abstracts programming functionality that assembler does not, for example, strings.