Strings are arrays of characters that are null-terminated. They can be manipulated using functions like strlen(), strcpy(), strcat(), and strcmp(). The document discusses initializing and reading strings, passing strings to functions, and using string handling functions to perform operations like copying, concatenating, comparing, and reversing strings. It also describes arrays of strings, which are 2D character arrays used to store multiple strings. Examples are provided to demonstrate reading and sorting arrays of strings.