The event fired when a user clicks an HTML element is the `click` event.
In the browser’s Document Object Model (DOM), `click` is a standard mouse event that signals activation of an element with a pointing device. JavaScript can respond to it with an event handler such as `element.addEventListener("click", handler)`. A click commonly follows a `mousedown` and `mouseup` on the same location, so those events are related but are not the canonical answer.
The `click` event can also participate in event propagation. If a button sits inside a div, the event may move through the capture phase, reach the button, and then bubble back through ancestor elements. This is why a listener on a parent can sometimes respond to a child’s click.
A common mix-up is `mouseover`, which fires when the pointer moves onto an element, and `keydown`, which fires when a keyboard key is pressed. On modern web pages, keyboard activation can also produce a click for some controls, so “click” describes the activation event rather than only a physical mouse action.