Newbee question!!!

I'm learning PHP and in the books I have, I see where they are starting some functions w/ int function_name blah blah. What does the int mean/do. I can't see any reference to it in the book, it just starts appearing in the code. I have a JavaScript and Cold Fusion background and the only thing I recall using int in those languages is to declare an integer (as in parseInt(whatever)) but that doesn't seem appropriate for the sample code I'm seeing. Ed