Word.ws English Dictionary

one-up-manship

one-up-manship is the alternative form of one-upmanship.

Meaning of one-upmanship

Noun

one-upmanship (plural one-upmanships)

  1. The art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor.
    • They are focused on one-upmanship, which is the essence of a competitive spirit.
  2. A succession of instances of outdoing a competitor.
    • 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...1965, Max Gluckman, “Foreword”, in M[axwell] G[ay] Marwick, Sorcery in Its Social Setting: A Study of the Northern Rhodesian Ceŵa, Manchester: Published by the University of Manchester at the...

Forms of one-up-manship

pluralone-up-manships

Questions about one-up-manship

What is one-up-manship the alternative form of?
One-up-manship is the alternative form of one-upmanship.

Words near one-up-manship in the dictionary

  1. one-two punch
  2. one-two punches
  3. one-two-three
  4. one-twos
  5. one-up
  6. one-up-manship
  7. one-up-manships
  8. one-up-one-down
  9. one-up-one-downs
  10. one-up-womanship
  11. one-up-womanships

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: one-up-manship (page history and authors); one-upmanship (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-up-manship.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one-up-manship. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.