outperform

O1U1T1P3E1R1F4O1R1M3
US/ˌaʊt.pɚˈfɔɹm/

verb

To perform better than something or someone.

Less commonScrabble 17

Meanings

verboutperform (third-person singular simple present outperforms, present participle outperforming, simple past and past participle outperformed)

present singular third person outperforms · participle present outperforming · participle past outperformed · past outperformed

  1. transitiveTo perform better than something or someone.

    Rail has continued to outperform bus operations, where a decline in ridership continues.

    2019 October 23, “Industry Insider: Continued rail growth”, in Rail, page 72
    4 more examples

    The strategy depends on an ability to outperform the market consistently, which many economists regard as virtually impossible.

    2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN

    ChatGPT performs well at writing argumentative student essays and outperforms the quality of the human-written essays significantly.

    2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays”, in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 8

    It[China] had a buoyant economy outperforming forecasts. Its unemployment rate was among the lowest in years. While consolidating his power for a second term, Mr Xi proudly pointed to China's "flourishing" growth model as something other countries could emulate.

    2023 November 15, Tessa Wong, “Xi Jinping arrives in US as his Chinese Dream sputters”, in BBC

    When GPT-4 was tested by medical experts from Microsoft without any specialized prompt crafting, it exceeded the passing score on USMLE by over 20 points and outperformed earlier general-purpose models (GPT-3.5) as well as models specifically fine-tuned on medical knowledge (Med-PaLM, a prompt-tuned version of Flan-PaLM 540B) [13].

    2023, Aravind Kumaresan, Lorna Udan, Shazad Ashaf, “Potential Role of ChatGPT in Healthcare in the Prevention and Management of Non-communicable Diseases”, in Lorna Uden, I-Hsien Ting, editors, Knowledge Management in Organisations: 17th International Conference, KMO 2023, Proceedings, Springer, page 432

Synonyms & antonyms

verbbe or do something to a greater degree

Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.

Origin

  1. Proto-Indo-European*úd
  2. Proto-Germanic*ūt
  3. Proto-Germanic*ūt-
  4. Old Englishūt-
  5. Middle Englishut-
  6. Englishout-
  7. Englishperform
  8. Englishoutperform

From out- + perform.

Full word history & related roots →
Cite this entry
APA

outperform. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/outperform

MLA

“outperform.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/outperform. Accessed November 2, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “outperform,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/outperform.

Source: outperform on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.