Dictionary.net

(Or "cut and paste", after the paper, scissors and gluemethod of document production) The system supported by mostdocument editing applications (e.g. text editors) and mostoperating systems that allows you to select a part of thedocument and then save it in a temporary buffer (knownvariously as the "clipboard", "cut buffer", "kill ring"). A"copy" leaves the document unchanged whereas a "cut" deletesthe selected part.A "paste" inserts the data from the clipboard at the currentposition in the document (usually replacing any currentlyselected data). This may be done more than once, in more thanone position and in different documents.More sophisticated operating systems support copy and pasteof different data types between different applications,possibly with automatic format conversion, e.g from richtext to plain ASCII.GNU Emacs uses the terms "kill" instead of "cut" and "yank"instead of "paste" and data is stored in the "kill ring".[Origin? Macintosh? Xerox?]