# Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought

> Zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting triggers step-by-step reasoning without examples by appending a cue such as "Let's think step by step" to the question.

- Identifier: PTL-0025
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/
- Also known as: zero-shot CoT, let's think step by step
- Introduced: 2022

## Description

Kojima et al. showed this single phrase produced large accuracy gains on arithmetic and logic benchmarks. The method uses a second prompt to extract the final answer from the generated reasoning.

## Broader terms

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

## Narrower terms

- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/plan-and-solve-prompting/)

## Related terms

- [Zero-shot Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-prompting/)

## Sources

- Kojima et al. (2022). Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0025). https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/

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