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The WordPress Excerpt is an optional summary or description of a post; in short, a post summary.
The Excerpt has two main uses:
To add an excerpt to a post, simply write one in the Excerpt field under the post edit box. An excerpt can be as short or as long as you wish. Usually, given its purpose, a couple of sentences is fine.
Interestingly, since the WordPress excerpt is similar in purpose to the META description of (X)HTML documents, excerpts can additionally be used as meta descriptions too. Some themes do this by default. It can also be done by means of an SEO plugin or a plugin for managing data in the head of (X)HTML pages.
The manual WordPress excerpt is often confused with the automatic excerpt or with the teaser (the part of a post that appears on the front page when you use the More tag). While both are related to the manual excerpt, they are different from it.
The relationship between the three is this: When a post has no manual excerpt, WordPress looks for a teaser to use as excerpt. If the post has no teaser either, WordPress generates automatically an excerpt by selecting the first 55 words of the post.