Word.ws English Dictionary

oneupmanship

oneupmanship is the alternative spelling 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...

Questions about oneupmanship

What is oneupmanship the alternative spelling of?
Oneupmanship is the alternative spelling of one-upmanship.

Words near oneupmanship in the dictionary

  1. oneths
  2. oneties
  3. onetime
  4. onety-one
  5. onety-oneth
  6. oneupmanship
  7. oneway
  8. Onești
  9. ONF
  10. ONF.
  11. onfall

Source and license

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