MapReduce is a software framework that allows processing of massive datasets across distributed computers. It uses a simple programming model where a problem is broken down into map and reduce phases. In the map phase, data is converted to key-value pairs and in the reduce phase, all values associated with a key are processed to generate results. As an example, a word frequency count of Wikipedia could be generated using MapReduce by splitting the data, mapping each split to count word frequencies, shuffling by key, and reducing to generate final counts.