Dictionary.net

A temporary memory area, used to transferinformation within a document being edited or betweendocuments or between programs. The fundamental operations are"cut" which moves data from a document to the clipboard,"copy" which copies it to the clipboard, and "paste" whichinserts the clipboard contents into the current document inplace of the current selection.Different Graphical User Interfaces vary in how they handlethe different types of data which a user might want totransfer via the clipboard, some (e.g. the X Window System)support only plain text, others (e.g. NEXTSTEP) supportarbitrarily typed data such as images.