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obsessed

verbadjectivecommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//əbˈsɛst//

Intensely preoccupied with or by a given topic or emotion; driven by a specified obsession.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of obsesssimple past and past participle of obsess

adjective

  1. 1

    Intensely preoccupied with or by a given topic or emotion; driven by a specified obsession.

    What was starting to unsettle him, to frighten him, was the idea that Merry was less horrified now than curious, and soon he himself became obsessed, though not, like her, by the self-immolators in Vietnam but by the change of demeanor of his eleven-year-old.

    Strangely, although it is an international cliché that the British are obsessed with the weather, it is a fixation with minor irritations: will rain spoil the wedding, the Test Match, the bank holiday?

    Everyone lay around in a sort of focused inertia, drinking, handing cigarettes back and forth, forgetting with whom, or whether, they were supposed to be romantically obsessed.

  2. 2

    Influenced or controlled by evil spirits, but less than possessed in that the spirits do not actually reside in the victim.

    Believing that an evil spirit is trying to obsess one is a dangerous belief, and when one comes to believe he is obsessed by an evil spirit, though there is not an evil spirit within a thousand miles of him, he will have all the symptoms.

    It is true, that by the workings of the law of attraction, and the susceptibility of mortals to the influence of spirit powers, mortals may become obsessed by the spirits of evil...

    What of demon possession, whereby a person is not only obsessed or oppressed by evil spirits, but these spirits actually reside in such a person?

Forms

comparative
more obsessed
superlative
most obsessed
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).