# Thread of Thought

> Thread of Thought is a prompting strategy for long, chaotic contexts that asks the model to walk through the context in manageable parts, summarizing and analyzing each before answering.

- Identifier: PTL-0039
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/thread-of-thought/
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

A typical trigger asks the model to go through the context step by step, summarizing and analyzing as it goes.

## Broader terms

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-thought/)

## Related terms

- [Lost in the Middle](https://protologue.com/t/lost-in-the-middle/)
- [System 2 Attention](https://protologue.com/t/system-2-attention/)

## Sources

- Zhou et al. (2023). Thread of Thought Unraveling Chaotic Contexts. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08734

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Thread of Thought. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0039). https://protologue.com/t/thread-of-thought/

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