Word.ws English Dictionary

yips

yips noun: a nervous condition which prevents a sportsperson from playing properly; especially a condition which causes a golfer to miss an easy putt, or a tennis player to serve a double fault. Also the plural of yip.

Noun

yips (uncountable)

  1. (informal) A nervous condition which prevents a sportsperson from playing properly; especially a condition which causes a golfer to miss an easy putt, or a tennis player to serve a double fault.
    • His office is a baseball park and he is a pitcher for the N.Y. Mets—a job guaranteed to give anyone a good case of after-hours yips.1962 May 4, Life, volume 52, number 18, →ISSN, page 3
    • Bracing as all this may be to the President, it gives his security and logistical forces the yips.1970, Newsweek, volume 76, page 13
    Synonyms:
    wobbles

Proper noun capitalized: Yips

Yips

  1. (plural) plural of Yip

Also used as

yips is also the plural of yip.

yips is also the third-person singular simple present indicative of yip.

Examples of yips in a sentence

  • Golfers may be surprised to learn that the yips, in one form or another, occur in a wide variety of other sports and even in other non-athletic walks of life and work.1992, Carol Mann, The 19th Hole: Favorite Golf Stories, Longmeadow Press, →ISBN, page 123:
  • Defining precisely why a professional cyclist might lose his touch on descents is as difficult as explaining a golfer's yips or a striker's sudden inability to find the net.2013 May 13, William Fotheringham, The Guardian:

Synonyms of yips

Origin of yips

Coined by Scottish-American professional golfer Tommy Armour in 1927.

Questions about yips

What does yips mean?
Yips means a nervous condition which prevents a sportsperson from playing properly; especially a condition which causes a golfer to miss an easy putt, or a tennis player to serve a double fault.
How do you use yips in a sentence?
Golfers may be surprised to learn that the yips, in one form or another, occur in a wide variety of other sports and even in other non-athletic walks of life and work.
What part of speech is yips?
Yips can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near yips in the dictionary

  1. Yippin Creek
  2. yipping
  3. yippings
  4. yippy
  5. yippy-kai-yay
  6. yips
  7. yir
  8. Yir-Yoront
  9. yirdaki
  10. yirk
  11. yirked

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: yips (page history and authors); Yips (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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Cite this entry: “yips.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/yips. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.