CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and the 'cascading' part refers to the priority scheme to determine which style rule applies if more than one rule matches a particular element. This mechanism is known as the cascade.  It calculates the specificity of a selector to determine which rules to apply, with inline styles having the highest specificity and type selectors having the lowest. If two selectors apply to the same element, the one with higher specificity will take precedence. If they have the same specificity, the rule declared later will be applied.