Word.ws English Dictionary

one-upsmanship

one-upsmanship 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-upsmanship

pluralone-upsmanships

Origin of one-upsmanship

From one-up + -s- + -manship.

Questions about one-upsmanship

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

Words near one-upsmanship in the dictionary

  1. one-upmanships
  2. one-upped
  3. one-upper
  4. one-upping
  5. one-ups
  6. one-upsmanship
  7. one-upsmanships
  8. one-upwomanship
  9. one-way
  10. one-way light time
  11. one-way light times

Source and license

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