Definition of "one-up" []

• Informal To keep one step ahead of (a competitor or opponent, for example). (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "And honestly, that portion of our program wasn't just informative, it may also be your secret weapon next Halloween when ya'll want to one-up that dude who always shows up at the party in some killer costume."
• "Comcast executives say the purpose of the switch is to deliver live TV service to any device that can connect to the Internet, as they attempt to one-up online video services that offer a relatively limited amount of content on demand, not live."
• "At dinner parties during the rest of the year, they vie to one-up each other with stories of malaria, harrowing airplane flights and close calls with venomous snakes in what most of their compatriots would regard as Third World hell-holes."