hero worship
noun
a profound reverence for great people or their memory.
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hero worship
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hero-worship
hero-worshipverb (used with object)to feel or express hero worship for.
hero worship
1 Americannoun
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a profound reverence for great people or their memory.
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extravagant or excessive admiration for a personal hero.
hero-worship
2
American
[heer-oh-wur-ship]
/ ˈhɪər oʊˌwɜr ʃɪp /
verb (used with object)
hero-worshiped,
hero-worshiping,
hero-worshipped,
hero-worshipping
hero worship
British
noun
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admiration for heroes or idealized persons
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worship by the ancient Greeks and Romans of heroes
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of hero worship1
First recorded in 1765–75
Origin of hero-worship2
First recorded in 1880–85
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The hero worship was taken too far when first one fan, then another, then another raced on to the pitch to get a selfie.
From BBC ● Aug. 12, 2026
A fitting coda to a childish slog of hero worship.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 30, 2024
“My intention throughout,” he writes, “has been to avoid hagiography and hero worship, telling Lewis’s full story with all its ups and downs intact.”
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 26, 2024
So yeah, we need to get rid of that sort of hero worship.
From Salon ● Sep. 1, 2023
Lamont gazed up at Nigel with hero worship in his eyes.
From "Secrets at Sea" by Richard Peck
The campers’ hero-worship of the staff … the inspiring dance montage … the angelic voices in the big finale.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 24, 2023
One wonders if Darick Robertson and Garth Ennis, the original comic book creators of "The Boys" imagined society would veer so close to realizing the twisted hero-worship parody they fashioned.
From Salon ● Jun. 5, 2022
But “Rising Phoenix,” stacked with hero-worship, suffers from a lack of depth.
From New York Times ● Aug. 26, 2020
Neither sculpture is a true likeness of the subject, but the first undermines the hero-worship of the idol – he is fallible, wrong, off-kilter.
From The Guardian ● Apr. 3, 2018
Maybe I’m still seeing with my old, hero-worship eyes, but what I saw was this: He was excellent.
From "The Sun Is Also a Star" by Nicola Yoon
“There was a crowd of girls who almost hero-worshiped her,” said Sheena Harris, a triathlete in Squamish.
From New York Times ● Apr. 8, 2016
This is a generous book, giving abundant credit to both the older generation of cartoonists whom the young Mr. Mankoff hero-worshiped to the new blood he has brought to the magazine during his tenure.
From New York Times ● Mar. 19, 2014
She went to movies and the races, hero-worshiped James Stewart, as a coed at U.C.L.A. noisily rooted for the football team.
From Time Magazine Archive
Line, a veteran of the South Viet Nam fighting, finds the lieutenant he hero-worshiped left with the mind of an eight-year-old as the result of a shrapnel wound.
From Time Magazine Archive
And as for the undergraduates who had hero-worshiped this former tennis champion, they now shyly turned to him for counsel and advice.
From How To Write Special Feature Articles A Handbook for Reporters, Correspondents and Free-Lance Writers Who Desire to Contribute to Popular Magazines and Magazine Sections of Newspapers by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
“I have been, like, hero-worshiping you,” said Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland.
From New York Times ● Oct. 14, 2014
Others supported the girl, saying she was a victim of what they believed was a hero-worshiping culture built around football players who think they can do no wrong.
From New York Times ● Dec. 17, 2012
THEN: After the Senators clinched the 1933 pennant, Cronin was "besieged in the clubhouse by a hero-worshiping throng of thousands of fans of both sexes gone mildly mad," according to a Sept.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 21, 2012
Before he goes off, the father disillusions his hero-worshiping son by spewing forth a lot of ugly facts.
From Time Magazine Archive
All morning, Mr. Hicks had made friends of the hero-worshiping youths, who listened to his tales of athletic triumphs at Bannister and at old Yale breathlessly.
From T. Haviland Hicks Senior by J. Raymond Elderdice
“They are hero-worshipped and unstoppable,” one anonymous soldier explained.
From The Guardian ● Nov. 18, 2020
Both men relied on political bases that hero-worshipped, often to the disbelief of the outside world.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 8, 2019
Although hero-worshipped, this great man never received Nobel recognition for his most famous work—relativity.
From Textbooks ● Aug. 12, 2015
When I was 11, I hero-worshipped the Tigers’ shortstop because I could imagine growing up to take his place.
From Slate ● Apr. 15, 2013
It felt surreal, to see the man standing not ten yards away from him, after having hero-worshipped him from afar for nearly a decade, after having laughed at every YouTube joke.
From "When Dimple Met Rishi" by Sandhya Menon
He seemed "curiously uncurious about ideas on how to tame hero-worshipping or robust decision-making mechanisms."
From Salon ● Sep. 10, 2022
It was not long-lived: Sports readers, it turns out, didn’t like even occasional interruptions in their hero-worshipping routines.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 5, 2021
In her biographical collection Heroes she argued that the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, along with Nietzsche, cleared a path for the 20th-century dictators with their hero-worshipping, anti-democratic ideals.
From The Guardian ● May 13, 2017
He enrolled at the Kunstakademie, an avant-garde hotbed soon dominated by Joseph Beuys, the shamanistic godfather of conceptualism—although Richter was always highly skeptical of the hero-worshipping claque Beuys gathered around himself.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 14, 2016
In truth, Dr. Bellair was already a close second to Mrs. St. Cloud in the girl's hero-worshipping heart.
From The Crux by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
