Discrete Fourier Transform: What is the DC Term really?
The DC term is the 0 Hz term and is equivalent to the average of all the samples in the window (hence it's always purely real for a real signal). The terminology does indeed come from AC/DC electricity - all the non-zero bins correspond to non-zero frequencies, i.e. "AC components" in an electrical context, whereas the zero bin corresponds to a fixed value, the mean of the signal, or "DC component" in electrical terms.

As far as practical applications go, the DC or 0 Hz term is not particularly useful. In many cases it will be close to zero, as most signal processing applications will tend to filter out any DC component at the analogue level. In cases where you might be interested it can be calculated directly as an average in the usual way, without resorting to a DFT/FFT.