Hashing is a technique to uniquely identify objects by assigning them keys via a hash function. This allows objects to be easily stored and retrieved from a hash table data structure. Collisions, where two objects have the same hash value, are resolved through techniques like separate chaining, linear probing, and double hashing. Hashing provides fast lookup times of O(1) and is widely used to implement caches, databases, associative arrays, and object storage in many programming languages.