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.
   • [V]arious emirates wanted their own ‘international’ airport, then an ‘international’ harbour, then cement factories, then container ports, then petro-chemical plants, then skyscraper hotels and, most recently, ‘international’ trade centres. […] The impetus for these projects continues to be...1981, Shahram Chubin, editor, Security in the Persian Gulf I: Domestic Political Factors (IISS Special Series; I), Montclair, N.J.: Published for the International Institute for Strategic Studies by...
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...
   • 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.2002, John Patrick Daly, “The Evangelical Vision of the South and Its Future”, in When Slavery was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Religion in the South)...