A large user story that awaits decomposition into smaller stories prior to implementation. Epics are typically stories that are far off on the development horizon, usually lower priority items. When an epic story works its way up the backlog, it is usually decomposed into smaller stories.
NB: One can easily be tempted to associate the term ‘epic’ with importance; in Agile, epic relates only to size.
Etymology
Mike Cohn coined the term epic as it relates to Agile.
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To understand epic please review below examples.
For HR team an epic may be named as a “Q1 Hiring”. to find how many new resources hired.
For Support team considering deployment of ITIL. Epic name “FLR” can be used to identify how many issues resolved by providing First Level Resolution.