Word.ws English Dictionary

tip the gaff

tip the gaff verb: to give away how a magic trick is accomplished.

Verb

tip the gaff (third-person singular simple present tips the gaff, present participle tipping the gaff, simple past and past participle tipped the gaff)

  1. To give away how a magic trick is accomplished.
    • Penn and Teller see their style as rejecting the assumption that “the people in the audience are ignorant savages who will fall at our feet and worship us for performing supernatural miracles.” Penn may enjoy describing the “Penn & Teller” approach to magic as tipping the gaff...1989, Calvin Trillin, “A Couple of Eccentric Guys”, in The New Yorker
  2. To reveal a disguise or something hidden.
    • 1914: The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, Volume 42, "The Parasite" by George Bronson-Howard
      Lady! She couldn't disguise herself as a lady with that Slavonic map of hers tipping the gaff, and those heavy hoofs of hers.

Forms of tip the gaff

third-person singular presenttips the gaff
present participletipping the gaff
past participletipped the gaff
pasttipped the gaff

Questions about tip the gaff

What does tip the gaff mean?
Tip the gaff means to give away how a magic trick is accomplished.
What part of speech is tip the gaff?
Tip the gaff is a verb.
What is the past tense of tip the gaff?
The past tense of tip the gaff is tipped the gaff.

Words near tip the gaff in the dictionary

  1. tip someone's velvet
  2. tip the balance
  3. tip the can
  4. tip the daddle
  5. tip the double
  6. tip the gaff
  7. tip the scale
  8. tip the scales
  9. tip the scales at
  10. tip the wink
  11. tip tool

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tip the gaff (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.

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