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Plectrums
Guitar picks, or plectrums are the devices that you hold between your pointy finger, and your thumb, to make your guitar playing better. A pick gives you more control when you are playing lead guitar, making the notes that you play sound more distinct. Plectrums are great to help speed up your guitar playing because unlike using your fingers or fingernails to pluck your strings you can get a nice up and down stroke that effectively doubles the speed that your right hand can produce notes.
If you combine your use of a plectrum with hand dampening at the bridge (the bit of your guitar that holds the strings to your guitar body) then you can get a brilliant thumping sound from your notes that sounds especially cool if you crank it through a distortion pedal or overdriven amp.
Here are some useful links to manufacturers of plectrums and guitar strings:
Guitar string manufacturers:
Guitar accessories, including plectrum manufacturers:
A guitar pick is a type of plectrum designed for use on a guitar. Manufacturers make picks from a variety of materials, including nylon, plastic, rubber, felt, tortoiseshell, wood, metal, and stone. Plastics include celluloid, nylon, Delrin, Tortex, Delrex and Lexan. They most often take the shape of an acute isosceles triangle with the two equal corners that are very rounded and the third corner rounded to a lesser extent. This shape is, however, merely one of many used by manufacturers. It's not the shape of the Jim Dunlop Stubby, for example.
My personal recommendation
If you're interested, my personal favourite is a Jim Dunlop Stubby plectrum because it's thick, grippy, small and with a sharp point, so it lasts a long time, is fast, and hard to drop.
In rock and metal music, when you play an electric guitar with high gain amplification or distortion, most people assume that thinner plectrums produce muddier, heavier, less controllable sound and thicker picks produce more delicate, more controlled and well-shaped tone.