Tkinter is a standard GUI library for Python that provides a powerful object-oriented interface to the Tk GUI toolkit. It allows for the creation of GUI applications through widgets like buttons, labels, text boxes, and more. Tkinter applications start with importing the library and creating a main window with Tk(), then entering the main event loop with mainloop() to wait for and process events. Widgets can be organized and placed within the main window using geometry managers like pack(), grid(), and place(). Events can also be handled through binding Python functions to different widget events.