Word.ws English Dictionary

one-downmanship

one-downmanship noun: a social tactic where someone tries to gain the upper hand in a conversation by emphasizing their own inferiority, hardships, or victimhood compares to others, often to elicit sympathy or undermine rivals.

Noun

one-downmanship (uncountable)

  1. A social tactic where someone tries to gain the upper hand in a conversation by emphasizing their own inferiority, hardships, or victimhood compares to others, often to elicit sympathy or undermine rivals.

Origin of one-downmanship

By analogy with one-upmanship.

Questions about one-downmanship

What does one-downmanship mean?
One-downmanship means a social tactic where someone tries to gain the upper hand in a conversation by emphasizing their own inferiority, hardships, or victimhood compares to others, often to elicit sympathy or undermine rivals.
What part of speech is one-downmanship?
One-downmanship is a noun.

Words near one-downmanship in the dictionary

  1. one-dog nights
  2. one-dollar contract
  3. one-dollar contracts
  4. one-dollar man
  5. one-dollar men
  6. one-downmanship
  7. one-drop
  8. one-drop rule
  9. one-eighth
  10. one-eighties
  11. one-eighty

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: one-downmanship (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: “one-downmanship.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one-downmanship. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.