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by Kate Woodford

This week, we’re looking at alternatives to the word advice, including single word near-synonyms and phrases. We’ll start by considering the noun ‘advice’ itself because it has some nice collocations. You give advice and you get advice. If you do what someone advises you to do, you take or follow their advice:

Rebecca gave me some good advice. / I thought I’d get some advice on starting up a business. / I might take your advice and change my hairdresser. / I followed your advice and booked early.

Remember that ‘advice’ is uncountable so if we want to use it in a countable way, we use the phrase piece of advice:

Can I give you a piece of advice? / That was a really useful piece of advice.

The expression a word of advice is also sometimes used before advising someone. It emphasizes the importance of what is to follow:

A word of advice – do take some lunch with you as the food stalls there are extremely expensive.

So, what about other words for ‘advice’? You might already know the noun tip, meaning ‘a useful piece of advice, especially on a practical matter’. We also use the noun hint to mean the same. (The word ‘handy’ often goes before both ‘tip’ and ‘hint’):

Do you have any tips for cooking tofu?

The book is full of handy hints for new parents.

We also use the word pointer to mean ‘a helpful piece of advice or information’:

Isabel might be able to give you a few pointers on how to improve your game.

The noun recommendation is often used when giving advice about what to choose:

Can you give me a recommendation for a place to stay?

Meanwhile, a hack is a good piece of advice, often providing a solution to a problem. ‘Hack’ is an informal word and is often used online:

Save time and money with these clever food hacks.

Let’s look now at phrases in this area. An expression that sometimes introduces a piece of advice, especially advice that warns about something, is a word to the wise:

A word to the wise – she’s still quite upset about Nick so it might be better not to mention him.

In UK English, if you advise someone or give them useful information about something, you may be said to give them a steer:

Ethan might be able to give you a steer on the best way to tackle that.

Of course, we ask for advice as well as give advice to others. If you ask someone who knows a lot about a subject for advice or information, you may be said to (UK) pick their brains (US) pick their brain:

I need to pick your brains about which printer to buy.

And what if you waste your time and energy giving advice to someone who ignores it? Someone might comment that you are wasting your breath:

You could try persuading her not to go but you’d probably be wasting your breath.

That concludes this week’s post. If you’re interested in the general area of giving advice and would like to learn how to give advice without giving offence, you might want to read my colleague Liz Walter’s post on giving advice and making suggestions.