Idiom
pro tip
Meaning
A useful piece of advice.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“Here is a pro tip: always save your work often.”
“If you want to cook the perfect steak, my pro tip is to let the meat rest before cutting it.”
“The seasoned traveler offered a valuable pro tip, suggesting that one should always pack a spare change of clothes in a carry-on bag to avoid disaster if luggage goes missing.”
Examples
simple
“Here is a pro tip: always save your work often.”
contextual
“If you want to cook the perfect steak, my pro tip is to let the meat rest before cutting it.”
complex
“The seasoned traveler offered a valuable pro tip, suggesting that one should always pack a spare change of clothes in a carry-on bag to avoid disaster if luggage goes missing.”
Origin
The term began as a standard collocation for professional advice in mid-century trade and hobbyist journals. *Popular Science* offered pro tips for solid joints in March 1959, while *Field & Stream* provided pro tips for hunting with a camera in September 1978. During this period, the phrase functioned as a simple shortening of "professional," appearing frequently in the context of golf and tennis instruction.
The transition to a lexicalised compound occurred within the culture of video gaming. *GamePro* magazine introduced the camel case solidification ProTip as a specific format for gameplay advice accompanying screenshots. The term gained wider currency as an Internet catchphrase following a hoax ProTip for id Software’s *Doom*. The advice offered for the game’s final boss—"To defeat the Cyberdemon, shoot at it until it dies"—was of such obvious utility that the term became a vehicle for sarcasm.
Key words
Related idioms
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