Update: Clippy is back with the latest Windows 11 update.

It's been a while since we've seen Microsoft's infamous character Clippy outside of memes, but as part of a major update aimed at making the more than 1,800 emoji characters look cuter and more three-dimensional in the coming months, Clippy is coming back.

These emojis look pretty good, too. You can see some of them in a video (embedded below) that Microsoft released this week in a Medium post detailing a major update to emoji. The goal is to bring Microsoft 365 products like Office and Teams in line with the company's Fluent Design System, a design Fluent Design System is a design vocabulary that the company began publicly deploying several years ago to succeed the Metro design language.

Fluent can most clearly be seen in the softer, rounder new look of Windows 11. is intended to look "softer, friendlier, and less intimidating."

This could mean a lot to those who have strong feelings about Clippit, a character that was always present in Microsoft Office in the 90s and early 2000s and was often criticized as an annoying pop-up. Originally branded Clippit, this character was the most prominent (and for many users, irritating) face of the Microsoft Office Assistant, and when it detected an opportunity to offer help or tips while a customer was using Office pop-up displays. [Predictably, most people quickly came to dislike the character, so much so that in 2002, Microsoft cynically ran an advertising campaign for Office XP, the latest version of Microsoft Office at the time, by promoting the fact that Clippy was being removed. The company even released anti-Clippy ads and a browser-based game in which users throw office supplies at Clippy.

To this day, Clippy seems to have resurfaced in the public mind as a piece of 90s nostalgia that many remember fondly. In fact, Microsoft released a softer, more three-dimensional photo of the new Clippy emoji on Twitter this week, and if the post received 20,000 "likes" and threatened to put them in Microsoft 365 if the post exceeded 20,000 likes, it received over 140,000 likes and 14,000 reactions within 24 hours. and over 14,000 retweets within 24 hours.

Of course, replacing the paperclip emoji in Microsoft 365 products with cuter, 3D clippies was all part of Microsoft's marketing plan. In a recent chat with The Verge, Microsoft art director and and "emoji researcher," Claire Anderson said, "I grew up using clippies, so it seemed like a fun little Easter egg.

Interestingly, The Verge notes that Clippy did indeed make a temporary reappearance in 2019 as part of an update to the official Microsoft Teams sticker pack, but (according to a Microsoft source trusted by The Verge) Clippy returned to work They point out that it was removed approximately one day later, following a decision by Microsoft's "brand police" who didn't like the idea of it being removed.

Now, Clippy appears to be officially back in action and will replace the existing paperclip emoji across Microsoft 365 products in the coming months as the company continues its attempts to make it more attractive and fun to use.

While it may seem frivolous, this move by Microsoft to make Windows, Office, and other products softer, rounder, and cuter could pay big dividends in the coming years.