Text areas are used for muliple lines of input. They often appear on web pages for comments. You specify how big the text area is using the rows and cols attributes. Any initial text is added as content.
You may have noticed that I only allowed 1 character for the size of the comment in the first example. Hardly fair....
<form>
<textarea name="comments" rows="15" cols="60">
Lots of space to rant about crazy assignments here...
</textarea>
</form>