Windows Server 2003 Question:

Domain Name System (or Service or Server), a service that resolves domain names into IP addresses and vice versa. Because domain names are alphabetic, they’re easier to remember.The Internet however, is really based on ip addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com might translate to 198.105.232.4.

The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server doesn’t know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned.