Phrase guide

pro tip

noun · 1 senses · updated from the 2026-07-25 local source snapshot

Definitions and examples are grouped by meaning. Pronunciation, history, word forms, translations, descendants, synonyms, antonyms, derived terms, and related words appear whenever the source provides them.

Sound

Pronunciation

Each Play button uses your device's default local English voice, or a natural local fallback. The selected voice name appears after playback. This is synthesized speech, not a source recording.

No pronunciation record was provided for this word.

1

noun

Meaning 1

A useful piece of advice.

Definition source: English Wiktionary via Wiktextract

Usage: idiomatic

No example sentence was provided for this meaning.

Meaning relationships

Synonyms: top tip

Antonyms: none provided

History

Etymology

Originally merely a sum of parts collocation (= professional tips), as for example in pro tips for solid joints [in woodworking] (Popular Science, March 1959), pro tips for hunting with a camera (Field & Stream, September 1978), and pro tips on the course or court from golf pros and tennis pros. In the era of videogaming, the camel case solidification as ProTip, a name for small pieces of gameplay advice used as screenshot captions in GamePro magazine, added a lexicalized dimension to yield a true compound. The advice in a hoax version of a ProTip for id Software's Doom ("To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies") was so comically obvious that it later became an Internet catchphrase.