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admiration

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˌæd.məˈɹeɪ.ʃən//

A positive emotion combining wonder and approbation; the regarding of another as being wonderful; a feeling of respect for another's skills or attributes, as one might look on a hero or role model.

noun

  1. 1

    A positive emotion combining wonder and approbation; the regarding of another as being wonderful; a feeling of respect for another's skills or attributes, as one might look on a hero or role model.

    admiration of a war hero

    They looked at the landscape in admiration.

    For in this Instance, Life most exactly resembles the Stage, since it is often the same Person who represents the Villain and the Heroe; and he who engages your Admiration To-day, will probably attract your Contempt To-Morrow.

    A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

  2. 2

    obsoleteWondering or questioning (without any particular positive or negative attitude to the subject).

    Lear. Your name, fair gentlewoman? Goneril. This admiration, sir, is much o’ th’ savour Of other your new pranks.

    And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.

    […] Admiration seized All Heaven, what this might mean, and whither tend, Wondering;

  3. 3

    obsoleteCause of admiration; something to excite wonder, or pleased surprise.

    Now, good Lafeu, Bring in the admiration; that we with thee May spend our wonder too, or take off thine By wondering how thou took’st it.

Etymology

From Middle English admiracion, borrowed from Middle French admiration, or directly from Latin admīrātiō, from prefix ad- (“to, towards”) + mīrō (“to look at”) + -ātiō. Compare the verb admire, and US dialectal terms miration and mirate.

Forms

plural
admirations
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).