Just to help you visualize aperture a little bit better, look at the chart below.

From
top left to bottom right, the aperture (aka iris) gets larger. As it get's larger, more
light is allowed in. So to put it into practice, what part of this chart would you set
your iris to if you were in a dark situation without a lot of light? Hopefully you said
towards the bottom right. Why is this so? Because the camera lens needs to allow
more light in to get proper exposure. On the other hand, if you are shooting
photos outside during the day, you may want to close down the aperture -
choosing one towards the top left to allow less light in.

Things get confusing when we start talking about f-stops. Each step of 'openness'
correlates with a specific f-stop. As sam mentioned in the video, they go from
f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8 and so on. The tricky thing is that the smaller the
number, the larger the opening. So in the chart above, which would be f/1.4? I hope
you said the bottom right one! The chart below visualizes this in a more clear way.
Another thing to remember is that not all lenses have the same range of f-stops.

Some lenses only 'stop down' to f/4. Some lenses go all the way down to f/1, and
all the way up to f/128 or above.

Wikipedia says:

In optics, the f-number (sometimes called focal ratio, f-ratio, f-stop, or relative
aperture) of an optical system is the ratio of the lens's focal length to the diameter of
the entrance pupil. It is a dimensionless number that is a quantitative measure of lens
speed, and an important concept in photography. The number is commonly notated
using a hooked f, i.e. f/N, where N is the f-number.