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.
Instead, “Him” wonders what kind of spiritual practice it is: hero worship or a sinister cult?
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 19, 2025
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
“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
Viewers are no longer interested in the patriotic, individualistic hero worship à la Captain America.
From Salon ● Nov. 27, 2023
In Danville they had made him the object of hero worship.
From "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison
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
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
She also describes a strange shift in rebellious hero-worship, at least among boys.
From The Guardian ● Apr. 8, 2017
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
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 Bleyer, Willard Grosvenor
“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
Joe, the highest-paid player in baseball, had said in advance that he would give the money gifts from his hero-worshiping fans to charity.
From Time Magazine Archive
Thus by the impulsive act of a hero-worshiping boy had Tharn's original task become a double one—and doubly difficult to accomplish successfully.
From The Return of Tharn by Browne, Howard
“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 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
She was at the hero-worshipping age, and George shared with the Messrs. Fairbanks, Francis X. Bushman, and one or two tennis champions an imposing pedestal in her Hall of Fame.
From A Damsel in Distress by Wodehouse, P. G. (Pelham Grenville)
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.
