A record lookup
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What an A record is
The A record is the original DNS mapping: a hostname to an IPv4 address. It is what a browser resolves before it can open a connection to a website at all - everything else (HTTPS, the page itself) happens after this lookup succeeds.
Why a domain can return more than one address
Many sites publish several A records for the same name, for load balancing or for resilience if one server is unreachable. A resolver (and a browser) is free to pick any of them, and different requests may get different addresses - that is by design, not a fault.
The TTL
The Time To Live tells resolvers how many seconds they may cache the answer before asking again. A short TTL means changes propagate faster but the authoritative server is asked more often; a long one is the opposite trade-off, and is why a just-changed A record can take a while to be seen everywhere.
Related tools
For the IPv6 equivalent see the AAAA lookup. To check what several resolvers currently return, see the DNS propagation checker. For the whole record set at once, see DNS lookup.
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