Someone who gives out information about which horse will probably win a race — advice you often pay for, in a newspaper column, a website, or a phone service. The word is strongest in British and Irish English, where horse racing has a big newspaper presence; a paper will have its own tipster whose picks appear every morning. From racing it has spread to any kind of betting: there are football tipsters and, these days, plenty of online betting tipsters. There is a second, wider use too: a person who passes information to the police or to journalists — a tip-off — though for that meaning "informant" or "source" is more usual. The word carries a faint smell of doubt. A tipster claims to know something you do not, and everybody understands that many of them are wrong most of the time, so "tipster" is rarely a title of great respect.