Traditionally, C was called a high-level language, but these days it is often referred to as a low-level language (it is high-level compared to Assembly, but it is very low-level compared to, for instance, Python, these days). Generally, everyone calls languages of the sort of Python and Java high-level languages nowadays.

How would you judge whether a programming language really is a high-level language (or a low-level one)? Must you give direct instructions to the CPU while programming in a language to call it low-level (e.g. Assembly), or is C, which provides some abstraction from the hardware, a low-level language too? Has the meaning of "high-level" and "low-level" changed over the years?