Official documentation explains it really well. Unfortunately all the necessary info are spread in different sections of documentation. Let me wrap up all that you need to know.
1.
Make sure they are in correct order (bottom to top).
2.
They are functions that take the source of a resource file as the
parameter and return the new source.
3.
Loaders can be chained. They are applied in a pipeline to the
resource. The final loader is expected to return JavaScript; each
other loader can return source in arbitrary format, which is passed to
the next loader.
So...
If you have somefile.css and you are passing it through loaderOne, loaderTwo, loaderThree is behaves like a regular chained function.
This answer was helpful to me but I'd like to complement with another point which affects loader order, which is the loadername! approach.
Let's say you have an url-loader in your config with an higher priority than file-loader and you'd like to import an image path with the latter. Doing nothing would import the file via url-loader (which creates an encoded data-url).
Prefixing the import with file-loader! would direct the import to that loader.