What do people mean when they talk about competition? This study maps newspaper discourse on competition in the United States and Germany from 1870 to 1945 using a corpus of approximately 1.1 million digitized articles. Through keyword analysis, dynamic topic modelling, and cross-lingual semantic embeddings, it tracks shifts in themes and tones related to competition throughout industrialization, interwar reforms, and wartime economies. The findings reveal a shift in German competition discourse from civic-commercial vocabulary in the 1870s to organized performance, order, and martial imagery by the 1930s. In contrast, American discourse remained anchored to institutional and economic vocabulary throughout this period. These divergent semantic trajectories are consistent with the different legal paths taken by both countries and suggest that competition narratives are culturally embedded in ways that can hinder transatlantic antitrust coordination and computational antitrust enforcement.