Paste is a soft, thick, sticky mixture, usually made by combining a powder with water or another liquid. When you mix flour and water to make papier-mâché, you create a paste that holds strips of newspaper together. A glue stick, the kind you use in art class, is a type of paste that dries to hold paper in place.

In cooking, paste can mean a thick, smooth mixture like tomato paste (concentrated tomatoes) or almond paste (ground almonds and sugar used in baking).

As a verb, to paste means to stick something using paste or glue. You might paste a photo into a scrapbook or paste text from one document into another on your computer. That computer meaning comes from the idea of cutting and pasting with actual scissors and glue, which people did before computers existed.

The phrase cut and paste originally meant literally cutting something out with scissors and gluing it somewhere else, but now mostly refers to moving text or images on a computer by copying and inserting them in a new location.