clipboard

A reserved section of memory that is used as a temporary holding area for data that is copied or moved from one application to another using the copy and paste and cut and paste (move) menu options. Each time you transfer something into the clipboard, the previous contents are deleted. Although there are clipboard viewers that let you view the clipboard's current contents, they are seldom used. The clipboard serves as a behind-the-scenes function, holding its contents for pasting (inserting) into another application. See copy and paste and cut and paste.

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(operating system)

clipboard - A temporary memory area, used to transfer information within a document being edited or between documents 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" which inserts the clipboard contents into the current document in place of the current selection. Different Graphical User Interfaces vary in how they handle the different types of data which a user might want to transfer via the clipboard, some (e.g. the X Window System) support only plain text, others (e.g. NEXTSTEP) support arbitrarily typed data such as images.