What does "one-upmanship" mean?

The art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor.

What is a synonym for "one-upmanship"?

Common synonyms include: art, artfulness, artifice, ascendancy, canniness, cleverness.

Pronounced //(ˌ)wʌnˈʌpmənʃɪp//.

//(ˌ)wʌnˈʌpmənʃɪp// noun

noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Noun

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
the practice of keeping one jump ahead of a friend or competitor wordnet
3
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 points either by ignoring earlier work or even by baldly asserting that it was all wrong."

"Now they find themselves in a dangerous game of name-calling and one-upmanship."

From one-up + -manship, probably modelled after gamesmanship.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.