Home › Glossary › Chain of Thought
Techniques · intermediate

What is Chain of Thought?

A plain-English explanation of Chain of Thought (Chain-of-Thought Prompting) — what it means, why it matters, and how it is used in AI.

Chain of Thought
Chain-of-Thought Prompting
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique where an AI model is instructed to reason step by step before giving a final answer, rather than jumping directly to a conclusion.
"Adding "think step by step" to a prompt dramatically improves performance on multi-step reasoning, mathematics, and logic tasks."

Also known as: Chain-of-thought, CoT, step-by-step reasoning

Prompt EngineeringReasoning

Why does Chain of Thought matter?

Chain-of-thought prompting is widely used for complex reasoning tasks, mathematical problems, and multi-step planning.

Practice this term

The best way to remember Chain of Thought is to practice unscrambling it. AI Terminology Scrambler uses spaced repetition to help you learn and retain AI vocabulary in just a few minutes a day.

Practice Chain of Thought now →

Related AI terms

Prompt EngineeringReasoning