Or it could mean 'appreciation' or 'thanks,' as when a sports club owes a 'hat tip' to a team for bringing fans to a game. Or it could be a synonym for shout-out, as when a public figure is given a 'hat tip' in an organization's newsletter for an action that benefits the organization. In the 1980s a hat tip could mean 'homage,' as when a musician's performance of a particular song is a 'hat tip' to the person best known for the song. Hatlo expressed his appreciation for ideas for all the years his comic ran (1929-1963), but the earliest evidence we've seen of the phrasing that included the hat tip explicitly - 'Thanx and a Tip of the Hatlo Hat' - is from 1962. Hatlo was known for giving a 'Tip of the Hatlo Hat' to the readers who contributed the ideas he based his 'They'll Do It Every Time' comics on. We don't know how old hat tipping itself is, but cartoonist Jimmy Hatlo may have been the first to put the idea to figurative use. By the end of the decade it was making appearances on major news websites. While Twitter is the place you're most likely to see h/t, its former primary domicile - and still a significant alternate residence - is the virtual land in which it was born in the early aughts: the blogosphere. You didn't stumble upon the interesting article on your own someone steered you to it. The h/t is a way of acknowledging a source.

Much of Twitter is about finding and sharing interesting stuff on the Internet, but it's not kosher to give the impression that you're the discoverer of content that someone else led you to. h/t h/t is especially well-suited to Twitter for two reasons: brevity - essential when you can only use 140 characters - and function. I just read a great article and you might want to read it too.

The h/t is most at home on Twitter, where it's used to tell the people your followers that something you're tweeting about was brought to your attention by someone else:

Hattip meaning