One-upmanship

Quick meaning: One-upmanship is a noun meaning The art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor.

Meaning

The art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor.

More Meanings

1. A succession of instances of outdoing a competitor.

Example Sentences

They are focused on one-upmanship, which is the essence of a competitive spirit.

Even these debates rarely constituted an exchange of ideas; they more resembled a contest of sectional champions, or a game of righteous, intellectual, and regional one-upsmanship.

Rather than indulge in historical oneupmanship – who knows, maybe the scratchings around the cave paintings were the first primitive hypertext links? – we will begin our brief overview of the history of hypertext in the same era as the birth of the technology which supports it.

I think all readers will be impressed by the manner in which Marwick places his own analysis in relation to previous studies both of sorcery and of conflict in general. His punctiliousness here contrasts sharply with the practice of some anthropologists who, in a contest of one-upmanship, score points either by ignoring earlier work or even by baldly asserting that it was all wrong.

Word Forms

• one-upmanships
• one-upsmanship
• oneupmanship

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include one-up-manship, one-upsmanship, oneupmanship, outdoing, upmanship, one-upwomanship.

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