The number to which a base is raised to is called the exponent. This tells you how many times to multiply the base together.
Let's look at an example.
Take a look at the image I provided.
The problem read here can be read as "5 to the 4th," or "5 to the 4th power." The larger 5 is called the base and the smaller 4 that is raised up is called the exponent. The exponent of 4 tells us that we multiply our base 4 times.
So we have 5 × 5 × 5 × 5 which is 625. The numbers that we multiply together are called factors so in this problem we have 4 factors of 5.