An attempt to elucidate the mystery of web server vs application server

Web server: Starting from word web. Web as we know is made most of static content. Taking this as a lead - a web server is one which delivers static content like HTML.

Eg: Apache - Apache is written in C language and hence it is not portable to all machines. This would suggest it to be appropriate for a web server.

Application server: Application denotes dynamicism. Application server delivers dynamic content, interacts with the database.

Eg: Tomcat - written in Java, hence such dynamic content can be delievered to the user at any machine over the internet.