Tips

How to spell tips

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tips

What does tips mean?

1. nounPractical pieces of advice or useful suggestions.
2. nounSmall sums of money given to service workers in appreciation of their service.
3. nounThe pointed or rounded ends of objects.
4. verbTilts, leans, or overturns something.

Tips in a sentence

• noun

  The article offered several tips for saving money on groceries.

• noun

  The waiters pooled their tips at the end of each shift.

• noun

  The tips of the scissors had grown dull over the years.

• verb

  If he leans too far back, the chair tips over.

• noun

  Her gardening tips helped the new plants survive the winter.

• noun

  Generous tips make up a large part of a bartender's income.

Where does tips come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The singular 'tip' arrived in English in the late Middle Ages and has more than one strand of origin tangled together. The oldest sense, the pointed end of something, came from a Germanic source related to the Dutch and Low German 'tip', meaning a fine point or extremity, and it is a cousin of 'top'. The verb meaning 'to tilt or overturn' appeared in the 1400s, possibly from a Scandinavian root, and originally described knocking something over. The 'gratuity' sense is the youngest, emerging around 1700 from slang where 'tip' meant to hand over or pass something quietly; the popular tale that it stands for 'to insure promptness' is a later invention with no basis in fact. The modern 'helpful piece of advice' sense grew naturally out of that idea of passing along something useful. The plural 'tips' simply adds the regular -s to all of these meanings.

How the word is built

• tip (root)
• -s (plural noun / third-person singular verb suffix)