tricks of the trade

Idioms and Phrases

Clever ways of operating a business or performing a task or activity, especially slightly dishonest or unfair ones. For example, Alma knows all the tricks of the trade, cutting the fabric as close as possible , or The butcher weighs meat after it's wrapped; charging for the packaging is one of the tricks of the trade .

Example Sentences

Growing up in Laos, she learned tricks of the trade from her Hmong community, for whom gardening was an important part of everyday life.

From Seattle Times

"I succeeded because I grasped the psychology of the buyer and the tricks of the trade," he said in the same interview.

From BBC

Watching him work on faceoffs after practice with seasoned NHL centerman Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, 38, showed he still has learning ahead in plying tricks of the trade.

From Seattle Times

Google’s legal team retorts that opening up such tricks of the trade is simply “not gonna happen”—an odd argument to make in light of Google’s willingness to share other inventions over the years with competitors, such as the Transformer machine learning model that paved the way for outsider apps like ChatGPT and Artifact, as well as its myriad open-source projects.

From Slate

He also wrote a book “So You Want to Be a Producer” in which he detailed the tricks of the trade.

From Los Angeles Times