The word "plain" here means that the text file does not contain formatting, it simply contains the characters visible in the file. Word processing documents contain fonts, colors, tabs, etc. We do not want this formatting. Therefore, we do not use word processors like "Word", etc.
Other names we will use for these plain text files:
Please note that the default extension for a plain text file is "txt". However, we'll often enter the filename with a "py" (if coding in Python), "java" extension (if coding in Java), etc. A few example plain text filenames: