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Adore vs Worship vs Idolize

Adore, worship and idolize in their nonreligious senses mean to love or admire excessively.

Adore commonly implies emotional surrender to the charms or attractions of an object of love or admiration; it often connotes extreme adulation if the object of love is a person.

  • this inability . . . to project his personality is a serious weakness in a country which likes to adore its leaders
    Doty

With other objects it may connote no more than a hearty liking.

  • like gourmets and yellow flies, sows adore eating truffles
    Laubefy

Worship usually implies more extravagant admiration or more servile attentions than adore; it also commonly connotes an awareness of one’s own inferiority or of one’s distance from the object of one’s love.

  • he worships his wife
  • small boys who worship astronauts

Idolize often implies absurdly excessive admiration or doting love.

  • idolizing money in life and poetry
    —New School Bulletin

Sometimes, however, it comes very close to adore.

  • a spoiled child is often one that has been idolized by his parents