A treasury tag, India tag, or string tag is an item of

stationery Stationery refers to commercially manufactured writing materials, including cut paper, envelopes, writing implements, continuous form paper, and other office supplies. Stationery includes materials to be written on by hand (e.g., letter paper ...

used to fasten sheets of

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, Textile, rags, poaceae, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre e ...

together or to a folder. It consists of a short length of string, with metal or plastic cross-pieces at each end that are orthogonal to the string. They are threaded through holes in paper or card made with a

hole punch A hole punch, also known as hole puncher, or paper puncher, is an office tool that is used to create holes in sheets of paper, often for the purpose of collecting the sheets in a binder or folder. A ''hole punch'' can also refer to similar t ...

or lawyers bodkin or electric drill, and the cross-pieces are sufficiently wide as to not slip back through the holes. The names ''Treasury tag'' and ''India tag'' are first found on record in a list of stationery items published by His Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) in 1912, and, both being capitalised, probably refer to

HM Treasury His Majesty's Treasury (HM Treasury), occasionally referred to as the Exchequer, or more informally the Treasury, is a department of His Majesty's Government responsible for developing and executing the government's public finance policy and ec ...

and the

India Office The India Office was a British government department established in London in 1858 to oversee the administration, through a Viceroy and other officials, of the Provinces of India. These territories comprised most of the modern-day nations of ...

. While the terms are now equivalent, a ''Treasury tag'' was originally a lace with a sharp metal tag at one end, which could be threaded through the holes in a stack of documents or cards and inserted into a corresponding tag at the other end, thus forming a loop and binding the documents. The tags, in that case, were in line with the string, similar to aglets on a shoelace.

References

Stationery Fasteners {{tool-stub