One-up, one-upmanship

Origin of: One-up, one-upmanship

One-up, one-upmanship

To be one up is to be ahead of one’s rivals and derives of course from sports where numbers denote scores. Thus, one could be one goal up in football, one set up in tennis etc. As such, the literal sense is of course very old but in the sense of one-upmanship, the art of staying ahead of one’s rivals in any endeavour, outside the context of sport, the expression dates from 1952 with the publication of Stephen Potter’s book One-Upmanship. This book was a sequel to his earlier book The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship. See also Gamesmanship.