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What is "obsess"

Crossword clues for obsess

obsess
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
obsess
verb
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
about
▪ The longer you provide wifely comforts while he obsesses about this woman, the worse it's going to be.
▪ Fashion models are the belles of the pop cultural ball: They are fawned over, obsessed about, prayed to.
▪ They obsess about it, the black art of stealing elections.
so
▪ Yet no country is so obsessed by race.
▪ And although alcohol is forbidden, rarely has there been a culture so obsessed with drinking.
▪ Nor are women so fixated by visual cues, so obsessed with physical rivalry.
▪ But today, some pentecostal preachers seem so obsessed with the techniques of rapture that they have forgotten the original message.
▪ The last nagging question is would we be so obsessed with the Simpson case if Nicole were black?
▪ The money with which she was so obsessed was the money he had made from his play ten years before.
▪ Emperor Charlemagne was so obsessed with her beauty, he continually harassed her.
■ NOUN
idea
▪ Alfred was intensely ambitious, obsessed with the idea of becoming rich, and channeled all his energy into his career.
▪ By its very nature, working for a leader is working for a person obsessed with an idea or agenda.
man
▪ Quaid plays Frank as an obsessed man, haggard with the burden of his job and with personal worries.
weight
▪ We are cruel to ourselves and cripple ourselves by constantly obsessing about our weight.
▪ Black and Latina women tend to be much less obsessed about their weight than white women.
▪ But if beauty on a grand scale chooses to live fully, rather than obsess about weight, whose problem is it?
▪ We are not obsessed with our weight.
■ VERB
become
▪ People who fell into these categories were similarly treated by a society that had become obsessed by power and success.
▪ He soon became obsessed with being part of the pop world, any way he could.
▪ It is told from the point of view of four boys who become obsessed with five beautiful sisters.
▪ Arax, then 15, became obsessed with the murder, which was never solved.
▪ The media have become obsessed with questions of what ministers knew and when they knew it.
▪ When the bones of Sheriff Wade are discovered, Sam becomes obsessed with learning if his father was the killer.
▪ In the remaining three weeks before departure I became obsessed about the training required to handle a week with the Springboks.
▪ Three slowly becomes obsessed with cooking, cleaning, nice sweaters and the little specks of food stuck between teeth.
seem
▪ He seems obsessed by the sheer potency of poetry.
▪ It was the side that seemed unnecessarily obsessed with the dark, seedy side of life.
▪ But today, some pentecostal preachers seem so obsessed with the techniques of rapture that they have forgotten the original message.
▪ We seem obsessed as a nation with school failure, with horror stories, with ridicule.
▪ It is a subject that seems to obsess him.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Some women obsess about their thighs and stomachs.
▪ The idea that she was being punished began to obsess her.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And he becomes obsessed with this tape.
▪ Arax, then 15, became obsessed with the murder, which was never solved.
▪ It was the side that seemed unnecessarily obsessed with the dark, seedy side of life.
▪ Sabich is obsessed, you said.
▪ The intermittent, flickering reality that obsesses Gael is, from the Catholic perspective, itself but a delusion.
▪ The longer you provide wifely comforts while he obsesses about this woman, the worse it's going to be.
▪ The more our rational faculty is suppressed, the more obsessed we are by it.
▪ Will the next millennium see man obsessed by athletic entertainment to the exclusion of other kinds of culture?
The Collaborative International Dictionary
obsess

obsess \ob*sess"\, v. t. [L. obsessus, p. p. of obsidere to besiege; ob (see Ob-) + sedere to sit.]

  1. To besiege; to beset. [archaic]
    --Sir T. Elyot.

  2. To excessively preoccupy the thoughts or feelings of; to haunt the mind persistently.

obsess

obsess \ob*sess"\, v. i. To be excessively or persistently preoccupied with something; -- usually used with on or over; as, to obsess over an imagined insult.

At all ages children are driven to figure out what it takes to succeed among their peers and to give these strategies precedence over anything their parents foist on them. Weary parents know they are no match for a child's peers, and rightly obsess over the best neighborhood in which to bring their children up.
--Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works, p. 449-450 [1997]).

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
obsess

c.1500, "to besiege," from Latin obsessus, past participle of obsidere "watch closely; besiege, occupy; stay, remain, abide" literally "sit opposite to," from ob "against" (see ob-) + sedere "sit" (see sedentary). Of evil spirits, "to haunt," from 1530s. Psychological sense is 20c. Related: Obsessed; obsessing.

Wiktionary
obsess

vb. (label en passive constructed with ''"with") To be preoccupied with a single topic or emotion.

WordNet
obsess

  1. v. haunt like a ghost; pursue; "Fear of illness haunts her" [syn: haunt, ghost]

  2. be preoccupied with something; "She is obsessing over her weight"

Wikipedia
Obsess
  1. Redirect Obsession

Usage examples of "obsess".

The obsessed leader of the Anabasis would not be content to monitor the situation on Travancore from distant Ceres.

He wound up on the Beach at Sigma End, where he hung out with guys like the legendary Billy Anker, at that time obsessed with Radio RX1.

She was interested in her body and her face, but she was obsessed with her hair, which at the time they rescued Billy Anker from Redline was a long pinkish-blonde floss that smelled permanently of peppermint shampoo.

The correspondents to whom his letters were addressed were not persons specially interested in religion or chemistry or the cabbala, and, of all men, Goethe was least likely to be obsessed by any set of ideas to the exclusion of all others.

Sir Patrick is probably just like Ridley, obsessed with that stupid legend and determined to find the Clachan Fala.

I obsess about sweets, and after dieting for a week I usually binge on cookies, candy, or cake.

Our Mick, the man obsessed with neatness, who has no social connections and heaps of good sense, the man in search of the perfect woman, falls in love with a dithery fortune-telling society girl who sees the future.

Syfte, the eldest daughter, was particularly intrigued, and even when she turned twenty, and rationality overpowered the primitive, childish adoration of Uncle Ender, she was still obsessed with him.

Captain Flume was obsessed with the idea that Chief White Halfoat would tiptoe up to his cot one night when he was sound asleep and slit his throat open for him from ear to ear.

Heston had enough to do to keep him from obsessing about the Gizmo, the fault lines, even the Neworlders, though the last were never far from his mind.

The President seemed to have become obsessed by Congressional headcounts lately.

Frontal Lobe Sun Belt Universities you will find the young of the Pre-Dom Species obsessed with disciplined Self-Actualized Hedonic Freedom.

Every moneyed fool that has gone into the game from the Marquis of Hastings down to the Jubilee Juggins has been obsessed with the same idea.

It seemed certain, in fact, that Keeling had become obsessed with possessing Eliza and her oh so prosperous plantation to the point that he would stop at nothing.

He had no idea what Jester was babbling about, when his thoughts were obsessed with the fact that Kylie should be stark naked by now.