playbook

English

Etymology

play +‎ book

Pronunciation

• enPR: plā'bo͝ok, IPA^(key): /ˈpleɪ.bʊk/
• enPR: plā'bo͞ok IPA^(key): /ˈpleɪ.buːk/ (still sometimes northern England; otherwise obsolete)

• Audio (US)

  (file)

Noun

playbook (plural playbooks)

1. A book containing the text of a play or plays. [from 1530s]
2. A book of games and amusements for children. [from 1690]
3. (US, American football) A book of strategies (plays) for use in American football (and by extension other sports or disciplines). [from 1965]
4. (US, figurative) A set of commonly employed tactics and strategies. [from 1990s]
   • 1994, Charles R. Wood, Sermon Outlines on Prayer, page 39:

     A Look at Satan's "Playbook"

   • 2017 March 17, Martin Kettle, “We used to think Theresa May was a safe pair of hands. We can no longer say that”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     This isn’t merely a gamble on May’s part. It’s an act of reckless political daring. It’s straight out of Danton’s playbook on boldness – de l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace. And look what happened to Danton – he lost his head.

   • 2017 March 21, Ed Finn, “The Corrupt Personalization of Netflix”, in Slate‎^[2]:

     The company has built its business on the motto “everything is a recommendation”—the company likes to brag that it tailors every aspect of its interface for each individual user. It’s a playbook the company perfected with House of Cards, which was a tremendous gamble for the business of television when Netflix launched the show in 2013.

   • 2020 March 5, Mike Isaac, David Yaffe-Bellany, Karen Weise, “Workplace vs. Coronavirus: ‘No One Has a Playbook for This’”, in New York Times‎^[3]:

     “No one has a playbook for this,” said Dan Levin, who runs a small company outside Chicago, Cain Millwork, which makes furniture and wall paneling. He said he was planning to have some of his office employees work from home.

   • 2021, Arthur Conklin, Greg White, Chuck Cothren, Roger L. Davis, Dwayne Williams, Principles of Computer Security, McGraw Hill, →ISBN, page 542:

     Security administrators can create a series of runbooks and playbooks that can be used in response to a wide range of incident response activities.

   • 2022 November 2, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac, Tiffany Hsu, “Elon Musk Takes a Page Out of Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Media Playbook”, in The New York Times‎^[4], →ISSN:

     But since closing his $44 billion buyout of Twitter last week, Mr. Musk has followed a surprisingly conventional social media playbook.

Derived terms

• rip a page out of someone's playbook
• take a page out of someone's playbook