What the bokeh is bokeh?

I've seen this term tossed around on photography forums and assumed it was some incredibly technical term related to lenses that I didn't need to know as a beginner. Turns out, it actually is something incredibly common that we've all seen in photos without actually knowing what we were looking at.

Bokeh is the quality of the out of focus portions of a picture, often produced when using a narrow depth of field or just being totally out of focus. What determines bokeh is the lens itself and looks different for each, and for this reason, lens reviews often mention bokeh as a point of consideration. When photographing points of light, this produces those round orbs that I'm sure you've seen before. Here's an example from Wikipedia of a Christmas tree:

And yes, bokeh is a Japanese word. There was no way I was going to figure it out without looking it up.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh