a profound reverence for great people or their memory.
extravagant or excessive admiration for a personal hero.
admiration for heroes or idealized persons
worship by the ancient Greeks and Romans of heroes
First recorded in 1765–75
First recorded in 1880–85
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
What could they teach us about the power and perils of hero worship in a community that has produced too few figures of Chávez’s stature?
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 19, 2026
The Emergency was also a stark warning against the perils of hero worship - something embodied in the towering political persona of Indira Gandhi.
From BBC ● Jun. 24, 2025
So yeah, we need to get rid of that sort of hero worship.
From Salon ● Sep. 1, 2023
Not everyone fell for the von Braun hero worship, however, including several prominent Jewish comedians.
From Slate ● Aug. 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
“Any time I walk down the street with Diggs,” says Calder, “young kids run up to him who have listened to that soundtrack over and over again, and they hero-worship him.”
From The Guardian ● Oct. 6, 2018
That’s thanks to Hawke’s sensitive direction and his wisdom in casting Dickey, Shawkat and Sexton, each of whom wisely dispenses with hero-worship and instead plays a flawed, utterly grounded human being.
From Washington Post ● Sep. 18, 2018
He babbled a charming hero-worship, one gentleman to another.
From "The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War" by Michael Shaara
“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
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
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
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 Bleyer, Willard Grosvenor
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
It is a tribute to Martin Gardner’s oeuvre that the final considered impression that he left is not very different from the one seen through the eyes of a hero-worshiping adolescent.
From New York Times ● May 31, 2010
An hour of musical fantasy, starring Child Actor Eddie Hodges as a daydreaming, hero-worshiping youngster more or less like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz.
From Time Magazine Archive
Early in the evening, while Duane sat on the porch with two awed and hero-worshiping sons of the house, Jones returned from a quick visit down to the post-office.
From The Lone Star Ranger, a romance of the border by Grey, Zane
Both men relied on political bases that hero-worshipped, often to the disbelief of the outside world.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 8, 2019
Besides, Dafoe himself has never hero-worshipped artistic suffering.
From The Guardian ● Nov. 19, 2018
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
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
The film is based on Thorson's published memoir, and inevitably assumes a position similar to that of the critical hero-worshipping Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.
From The Guardian ● Jun. 8, 2013
Whereas they are, in reality, hero-worshipping, on the one hand, the Male in their Cult, and on the other, the Masculine traits of its female exponents.
From Feminism and Sex-Extinction by Kenealy, Arabella
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.
