to top oneself
- phrasal verb
- UK
:
superarse
- After winning gold last year, she was determined to top herself and achieve even greater results this season.
Examples
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How will you ever top yourself?
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I wondered if Meggin could top herself.
Blog text (13) -
Cook supper for the housekeeper, would do all that, but Anna started to top herself.
Fiction book (1998) -
Or you top yourself.
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If you thought Kim Kardashian couldn't possibly top herself in the "stupid and offensive statements made" department, you're wrong, and perhaps you don't know her potential, but her most recent comments take the cake over all the others.
Blog text (25) -
His last album was a huge success, and now he's trying to top himself with his next release.
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In the cooking competition, each chef aimed to top themselves with innovative dishes that surpassed their earlier creations.
Synonyms
146
2.4
To be better than others in a contest or ranking
Antonyms
How Improved
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly derivable from combining 'top' (to exceed) with the reflexive 'oneself' — together they literally indicate exceeding one’s own previous performance. This is a transparent, compositional reflexive pattern found cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows the parts should understand it.
Etymology
The phrasal verb top oneself comes from the picture of adding a new piece on top of a stack to make it higher than before. Top means to put above and oneself shows you are beating your own record, so top oneself means 'to do even better than you did before'.