In imperative programming you explicitly tell a program what to do and in which order to do it. (How should the program accomplish it?)
An ‘imperative program consists of commands for the computer to perform’ according to Wikipedia.
This is in contrast to declarative programming which lets you describe the outcome.
This is a programming definitions.
See also declarative vs imperative instructions.
References
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/211050/declarative-vs-imperative-language.html