pro tip
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.40 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Shoppers picking up ground beef, for example, encounter the stork on in-store shelf ads near the meat section, where a speech balloon near his ample beak says, "Pro tip: Serve your burgers with a Vlasic pickle. Amateur tip: Don’t.""
- "Pro tips on which games your child should play, how long they should play for, how to limit screen time – and what to do if their friend plays violent games"
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.
Inflected Forms
Phrases
Frequently Paired Words
Synonyms
top tip