Short answer. Sharia means "the path." It is God's guidance for living — mostly prayer, charity, honesty, family and character. The dramatic punishments people imagine are a small, heavily-restricted corner of it, and Muslims differ on how they apply today.
Where the idea comes from
In the headlines "sharia law" almost always appears next to a story about flogging or amputation, so the word comes to stand for a single, brutal penal code imposed on everyone. That picture leaves out almost everything sharia actually is.
"The path to follow"
Sharia literally means a path — originally the path to water, a source of life. In the Quran it is the God-given way of living:
"Then We put you, [O Muhammad], on an ordained way [sharia] concerning the matter [of religion]; so follow it..."
— Quran 45:18 (Saheeh International)1
In practice, the overwhelming majority of sharia is about worship and personal life — how to pray, fast, give charity, marry, raise children, do business honestly and treat others well. It is far closer to a guide for a devout, ethical life than to a criminal code.243 See, for example, The Five Pillars, Halal and Haram and Ethics and Character.
Not one fixed code
Sharia is the divine guidance; fiqh is the human effort to understand and apply it. Because it is interpreted, it produced several schools of law (madhhabs) that differ on the details — so "sharia" was never a single uniform rulebook.245 The fixed criminal penalties people focus on are a narrow category, fenced in by very demanding standards of evidence, and Muslims and scholars disagree about whether and how they should be applied in modern states.24
In short
Sharia is the "path" of a life lived toward God — mostly worship, ethics and family, not punishment. It is understood through human interpretation, comes in more than one school, and is debated among Muslims themselves. Reducing it to its harshest penalties mistakes a small, contested fraction for the whole.