Word.ws English Dictionary

pro tip

pro tip noun: a useful piece of advice.

Noun

pro tip (plural pro tips)

  1. (idiomatic) A useful piece of advice.
    • 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."2011 April 25, Andrew Adam Newman, “Taking Pickles Out of the Afterthought Aisle”, in New York Times
    • 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 games2017 May 11, Ellie Gibson, “Children and video games: a parent's guide”, in The Guardian
    Synonyms:
    top tip

Synonyms of pro tip

  • top tip

Forms of pro tip

pluralpro tips
alternative formprotip
alternative formpro-tip
alternative formProTip

Origin of pro tip

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.

Questions about pro tip

What does pro tip mean?
Pro tip means a useful piece of advice.
What part of speech is pro tip?
Pro tip is a noun.
What is the plural of pro tip?
The plural of pro tip is pro tips.

Words near pro tip in the dictionary

  1. pro tanto
  2. pro tem
  3. pro tem.
  4. pro tempore
  5. pro time
  6. pro tip
  7. pro tips
  8. pro wrestling
  9. pro'lem
  10. pro-
  11. pro-abort

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pro tip (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “pro tip.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pro_tip. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.