/klɪp/
[verb] To cut something, usually with scissors or shears, removing a small piece; or to fasten things together using a small device that holds them in place.
'Clip' carries two completely opposite meanings — one cuts things apart, the other holds them together — and they come from entirely different ancient languages.
The word 'clip' is one of English's most fascinating double personalities, hiding two entirely separate words inside one short sound. The cutting sense and the fastening sense look identical on the page, but they are linguistic strangers who simply happened to arrive at the same spelling by coincidence — a process linguists call homonymy.
The 'cutting' clip traces its roots to the Old Norse word klippa, meaning to cut or shear, which was brought to Britain by the Viking settlers who flooded into northern and eastern England from the 8th century onward. Old Norse klippa → Middle English clippen → Modern English clip. This sense was especially vivid in the context of shearing sheep, a vital part of medieval rural life, and the word carried a satisfying physical directness. To clip was to make something shorter, neater, or separated — a sheep's fleece, a hedge, a coupon, or even a person's hair.
The 'fastening' clip has a different and older ancestry. It descends from Old English clyppan, meaning to embrace, clasp, or hold tightly. Old English clyppan → Middle English clippen → Modern English clip. This sense of warm physical enclosure is preserved in the old English place name Chipping, which shares a related root around the idea of holding or gathering, and it survives in the modern image of a paper clip — something that embraces a stack of papers and holds them close, just as an arm might hold a friend.
By the Middle English period, both streams had converged on the spelling 'clippen' and later 'clip,' making it almost impossible to guess from the word alone which ancestry a particular use was drawing on. The cutting sense flourished in everyday domestic and agricultural life, while the holding sense gave rise to the modern family of fastening devices — paper clips, hair clips, ammunition clips, and tie clips — all objects that grip rather than cut.
Over time, clip extended its reach into unexpected directions. In American English it came to mean a rapid pace ('at a good clip'), a usage that probably grew from the swift, decisive snipping motion of cutting. It also came to mean a single extract of film or video, preserving the old shearing idea of cutting a piece away from a larger whole. And in informal British English, a clip once meant a sharp blow — a meaning that likely arose from the fast, glancing contact of scissors snapping shut.
Few English words carry such richly contradictory histories. To clip is to separate and to unite, to cut away and to hold together, to snip a thread and to clamp two things as one. Every time you reach for a paper clip or trim a hedge, you are unknowingly choosing between two different ancestral voices — one Viking, one Anglo-Saxon — that have been sharing a name for nearly a thousand years.