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
Herbert wrote about his distrust — hatred, even — of hero worship and how it influenced Dune for the July 1980 issue of Omni Magazine.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 27, 2024
So yeah, we need to get rid of that sort of hero worship.
From Salon ● Sep. 1, 2023
They help us to peel back some of the layers of legend and hero worship that obscure the whole story of American history.
From "In the Shadow of Liberty" by Kenneth C. Davis
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
“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
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
“I have been, like, hero-worshiping you,” said Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland.
From New York Times ● Oct. 14, 2014
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
Then, for three decades, the South Pole drew Dick Byrd back, and each time he returned to a hero-worshiping nation with new glory.
From Time Magazine Archive
The other organizations, even as late as this, were still little more than coteries, of hero-worshiping tendencies, fast developing into sectarian organizations that seemed destined to divide hopelessly and forever the labor movement.
From Violence and the Labor Movement by Hunter, Robert
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
Among a range of offerings, then, it’s probably fine to offer yet another show devoted to Impressionism, as long as it does something other than retell the same hero-worshipping story.
From Seattle Times ● Jun. 30, 2021
In 2010’s Boy, for example, Waititi played an absent father in a nowhere coastal New Zealand town whose hero-worshipping son doesn’t realise what a self-serving prat he is.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 26, 2019
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
I'm afraid it wasn't at all the spirit to go hero-worshipping; and none of them knew anything about "The Twa Brigs" of Burns's poem.
From The Heather-Moon by Williamson, A. M. (Alice Muriel)
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.
