The Hipparcos Input Catalogue was constructed as the observing program for ESA's Hipparcos astrometry mission. This has resulted in a catalogue of stellar data including up-to-date information on positions, proper motions, magnitudes, colors, and when available, spectral types, radial velocities, multiplicity and variability information. The catalogue is complete to well-defined magnitude limits, and includes a substantial sampling of the most important stellar categories present in the solar neighbourhood beyond these limits. The magnitude limits vary from 7.3 to 9 magnitudes as a function of galactic latitude and spectral type, and there are no stars fainter than about V = 13 mag. 118000 stars are included in the Hipparcos Input Catalogue, about half of them have been selected within well-defined limits in V magnitude, spectral type and galactic latitude (the "survey"), half of them within proposed observing programs. The mean accuracies achieved, as demonstrated by comparison with the Hipparcos results (Turon et al. 1995A&A...304...82T) are 0.3 arcsec for the positions and 0.25 mag for the Hp magnitude, with accuracies of 0.02 mag or better for more than a third of the catalogue. The data set consists of the main catalogue, and the first supplement which contains more detailed information for multiple system components. Other supplements with identification charts can be found in the published version. A complete description is provided, either as a LaTeX file (intro.tex), or as a plain ascii file (intro.cat).