Word.ws English Dictionary

get one up on

get one up on verb: to outdo.

Verb

get one up on (third-person singular simple present gets one up on, present participle getting one up on, simple past got one up on, past participle (UK) got one up on or (US) gotten one up on)

  1. (transitive) To outdo.
    • So why not rob these red cloaks? Serves em right for letting their guard down. Isn’t that the unwritten law of the land? If someone gets one up on you, you deserve it for letting them?2017 July 16, Brandon Nowalk, “Chickens and dragons come home to roost on Game Of Thrones (newbies)”, in The Onion AV Club

Forms of get one up on

third-person singular presentgets one up on
present participlegetting one up on
pastgot one up on
past participle UKgot one up on
past participle USgotten one up on

Questions about get one up on

What does get one up on mean?
Get one up on means to outdo.
What part of speech is get one up on?
Get one up on is a verb.
What is the past tense of get one up on?
The past tense of get one up on is got one up on.

Words near get one up on in the dictionary

  1. get on to
  2. get on up
  3. get on with
  4. get on with you
  5. get one over on
  6. get one up on
  7. get one's
  8. get one's a into g
  9. get one's act together
  10. get one's affairs in order
  11. get one's arms around

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: get one up on (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “get one up on.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/get_one_up_on. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.