to obsess about
26
6.0
- phrasal verb
- /əbˈsɛs əˈbaʊt/
:
obsesionarse (con)
- He tends to obsess about minor details, making it hard for him to complete tasks efficiently.
- obsess about her weight
- obsess about food
- obsess about things
She was the one who was obsessed about fungal organisms.
- She was the one who was obsessed about fungal organisms.
- We ruminate and maybe even obsess about what we did wrong.
- Would we be having a war in Ukraine if the West hadn't just started obsessing about all this stuff?
- And now they've got the goods to show the world that he's he's truly evil, which everybody understood, but they're just obsessed about Ukraine and Russia too.
- But really in the here and now, it's about giving me a kind of thing to be obsessed about because I have to be obsessed about something.
- I think it just more of like you do something and then you get obsessed about it and you do everything you can to make it happen.
- And also I'm not going to obsess about all the the seven different things that I could see in Key West.
- Stop obsessing about calories and start thinking about food much more as quality and what it does to your body.
- But I think from an evolutionary perspective, I do understand it because there is a reason cultures tend to obsess about virginity.
- And some people just obsessed about this sort of thing, right?
Examples
-
You guys are all nuts to obsess about the election results this way.
Blog text (33) -
I talk about it a lot because I've been obsessing about it for a long time.
Blog text (1) -
And some people just obsessed about this sort of thing, right?
-
And then pretty obsessed about the video and I'm just like, leave me alone.
-
I mean, someone has to, what with you obsessing about the past and all.
-
Just gives me something else to obsess about...
Fiction book (2001) -
The objective here is to stop obsessing about it for a while so you can calm down.
Blog text (22) -
You have to stop obsessing about the nanny.
-
So the thing that I'm sort of obsessing about right now is friendship.
-
I am a perfectionist, and I tend to obsess about things too much.
Academic text (2004)
Synonyms
∞
2.0
Feel afraid about what might happen to someone or something
304
5.5
To think about something so much that it makes you worried
46
7.0
To think about someone or something all the time
33
4.9
To think about something too much so you cannot decide or act
22
5.5
To worry a lot about something and have trouble deciding
7
6.5
To think too much about something so it becomes confusing and stops you from acting
3
6.7
Think about something in a worried way for a long time
2
5.4
To keep thinking about a small detail and not move forward
Give too much attention to one thing and ignore others
Antonyms
How Obsessed
Surface Forms
Morphology
The verb 'obsess' already conveys excessive preoccupation and 'about' marks the topic, so the combined meaning 'to think about something too much' is directly and compositionally derivable from the parts. This verb + about pattern is cross-linguistically common and follows normal English argument structure, making it immediately understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.
Etymology
The phrase obsess about gives the picture of a thought that keeps coming back and will not leave your mind, like a song you cannot stop hearing. That's why it means 'to think about something too much'.