# Chain-of-Thought Prompting

> Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting elicits a sequence of intermediate reasoning steps from a language model before its final answer, which improves performance on multi-step arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks.

- Identifier: PTL-0024
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-thought/
- Also known as: CoT, step-by-step reasoning
- Introduced: 2022

## Description

Wei et al. introduced CoT by including worked examples with step-by-step reasoning in a few-shot prompt, and found the benefit emerged mainly in large models. It is the root of a large family of techniques, including zero-shot CoT, self-consistency, and tree of thoughts, and of the extended reasoning trained into modern reasoning models.

## Example

```
Q: Roger has 5 balls. He buys 2 cans of 3 balls each. How many balls does he have?
A: He starts with 5. Two cans of 3 is 6. 5 + 6 = 11. The answer is 11.
```

## Narrower terms

- [Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought](https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/)
- [Automatic Chain-of-Thought](https://protologue.com/t/auto-cot/)
- [Self-Consistency](https://protologue.com/t/self-consistency/)
- [Tree of Thoughts](https://protologue.com/t/tree-of-thoughts/)
- [Contrastive Chain-of-Thought](https://protologue.com/t/contrastive-chain-of-thought/)
- [Thread of Thought](https://protologue.com/t/thread-of-thought/)

## Related terms

- [Scratchpad](https://protologue.com/t/scratchpad/)
- [Reasoning Model](https://protologue.com/t/reasoning-model/)
- [Unfaithful Chain-of-Thought](https://protologue.com/t/unfaithful-chain-of-thought/)

## Sources

- Wei et al. (2022). Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Chain-of-Thought Prompting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0024). https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-thought/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)