Paperclip Emoji

A silver wire paperclip of the classic Gem-type design: one and a half loops of bent steel. 📎 means office supplies, email attachments, and, in meme culture, Microsoft's Clippy, the animated assistant that asked "It looks like you're writing a letter" in 1997 and never quite went away.

The paperclip also carries real historical weight: during the Nazi occupation of Norway, citizens wore paperclips on their lapels as a symbol of resistance. The word "binders" in Norwegian became a coded reminder that they were bound together against the occupiers. The occupation force banned it; people were jailed for wearing them. There is a large paperclip statue standing at an Oslo business school today to honor the protest.

And then there's Kyle MacDonald's "One Red Paperclip" project from 2005: one Craigslist post turned a single red paperclip into a two-story house in Kipling, Saskatchewan, through 14 trades over exactly one year. A book, a statue, and a trading-up TikTok genre all trace back to that one post.

📎 was approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F4CE PAPERCLIPU+1F4CE PAPERCLIP. A cousin emoji 🖇️ (two linked paperclips) was added in Unicode 7.0.

📎 moves between corporate, meme, and hustle registers.

In professional email, it's the universal symbol for "attached file." Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and essentially every messaging app since the 1990s uses the paperclip icon to mean "there's a file clipped to this message." Typing "see attached 📎" in a work message is peak office humor.

In meme culture, 📎 is Clippy. Any intrusive AI assistant, any unsolicited advice, any pop-up that won't go away gets the Clippy treatment. Copilot, Gemini, and ChatGPT all get Clippy comparisons when they over-help. Microsoft fully leaned in: in 2021, they replaced their paperclip emoji with a Clippy design in Microsoft 365 apps, and the announcement became one of their most-liked tweets.

In hustle culture and TikTok trading challenges, 📎 means "start from nothing, end with something." Kyle MacDonald's paperclip-to-house project spawned a whole genre of creators who trade up from small items. The emoji often tags these videos directly.

On Unicode's frequency list, 📎 is well down the tail. It's a specialist, not a social emoji, but its rate of use in email subject lines and professional replies outpaces most "office" emojis.

The first patented paperclip design belongs to Samuel B. Fay, awarded US Patent 64,088 in 1867. It was originally intended for attaching tickets to fabric. The patent mentioned paper only as an afterthought.

The design everyone actually uses today is the Gem-type clip, a double-loop wire first produced in Britain in the early 1870s by the Gem Manufacturing Company. The kicker: Gem never patented it. The absence of a patent is why it became the global standard. Any factory anywhere could make one, and by the 1930s virtually every paperclip sold in the world was a Gem.

The Norwegian connection is messier than the legend. Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian patent clerk, received German and US patents for a wire paper binder in 1899–1901. His design was inferior to the Gem and never went into mass production. But when Norway fell under Nazi occupation in 1940, the country embraced Vaaler as the national inventor and wore paperclips on their lapels in protest. "Binders" in Norwegian meant the same thing as "binding together." The occupation force eventually banned the display of paperclips, and people were arrested for wearing them. The statue of Vaaler's paperclip at BI Norwegian Business School still stands today.

Kyle MacDonald's One Red Paperclip project started on Craigslist on July 12, 2005. Fourteen trades later, through a fish pen, a ceramic doorknob, a camp stove, a generator, a beer keg with a Budweiser neon sign, a snowmobile, a trip to the Rocky Mountains, a delivery truck, a recording contract, a year's rent in Phoenix, an afternoon with Alice Cooper, a KISS snow globe, and a movie role, he owned a two-story house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. Exactly one year, to the day.

And Clippy: commissioned by Microsoft in 1996 from illustrator Kevan J. Atteberry, officially named "Clippit," based on a now-infamous Stanford study by Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves showing people treat computers like social actors. Microsoft concluded Office needed a face. The face was a paperclip with eyebrows. It was universally hated, retired in 2007, and then lovingly resurrected by nostalgia 15 years later.

1. 1867First paperclip patent. Samuel B. Fay patents a bent-wire clip in the US, originally for pinning tickets to fabric.
2. 1870Gem Manufacturing starts production. British firm Gem Ltd. begins producing the double-loop design that becomes the world standard. Never patented.
3. 1899Vaaler patents in Germany. Norwegian Johan Vaaler patents his alternative design. It's functionally worse and never mass produced.
4. 1930Gem becomes the standard. Gem-type clips dominate global office supplies.
5. 1940Norwegian resistance symbol. Norwegians wear paperclips on their lapels under Nazi occupation. Wearing one becomes illegal.
6. 1997Clippy launches. Microsoft releases Office 97 with the Office Assistant. Clippy becomes the most hated helper in software history.
7. 2006One Red Paperclip completes. Kyle MacDonald trades a red paperclip up to a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan over one year and 14 trades.
8. 2007Clippy is killed off. Microsoft retires the Office Assistant with the launch of Office 2007.
9. 2010📎 enters Unicode. Paperclip added in Unicode 6.0.
10. 2021Clippy returns as emoji. Microsoft replaces the standard paperclip design with Clippy in Microsoft 365 apps.

• •The first paperclip patent went to Samuel B. Fay in 1867, originally designed for pinning tickets to fabric. The paper application was mentioned almost as an afterthought in the patent.
• •The Gem-type design was never patented. Gem Manufacturing started making it in Britain in the 1870s, and the absence of a patent is why it became the global standard, any factory could copy it freely.
• •Norwegians wore paperclips on their lapels under Nazi occupation (1940–1945) as a resistance symbol. The word "binders" in Norwegian meant binding together against the occupiers. Wearing one was banned and could get you arrested.
• •There's a giant paperclip statue at BI Norwegian Business School commemorating the resistance. It honors Johan Vaaler as the "Norwegian inventor of the paperclip," even though his 1899 design was inferior and never mass produced.
• •Clippy was designed by illustrator Kevan J. Atteberry after he produced 260 draft assistant characters. Microsoft picked the paperclip. Only 12 of the 260 designs made it into Office 97.
• •Microsoft's internal code name for the Office Assistant project was "TFC," which stood for "That F***ing Clown." Staff had opinions about their own product.
• •Kyle MacDonald's One Red Paperclip project took exactly one year (July 12, 2005 to July 12, 2006). The town of Kipling, Saskatchewan erected a giant paperclip sculpture in his honor.
• •The binder clip, invented by Louis E. Baltzley in 1910, was designed to help his father hold together manuscripts. It's a distant cousin, but only the Gem-type paperclip made it into Unicode as 📎.
• •In 2021, Microsoft replaced its paperclip emoji with Clippy across Microsoft 365. The announcement post became one of their most-engaged tweets. The internet went from hating Clippy to missing him in exactly 14 years.