obsessed

1. 1
   adjective

   Intensely preoccupied with a particular topic or emotion, driven by a powerful and persistent fixation.

   Like a magnet that keeps pulling your attention back to the same spot.

   The detective became obsessed with solving the decades-old disappearance.

   Fans grew obsessed with every detail of the singer's private life.

   Similarfixated, preoccupied, consumed

   Oppositeindifferent

   Note

   Two prepositions follow this adjective. Obsessed with names the subject of a fixation, as when Mark Lawson in The Guardian (1999) calls the British obsessed with the weather. Obsessed by keeps more of the verb and names what grips the person, as in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. The word is fully gradable (more obsessed, most obsessed), and an adverb can name the kind of fixation, as in Thomas Pynchon's romantically obsessed.

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past tense and past participle of obsess.

   The unsolved puzzle obsessed her until she finally cracked it.

   Critics have obsessed over the film's hidden meanings since its release.

   Note

   One spelling does three jobs here: simple past, past participle, and the "preoccupied" adjective. As a transitive verb it takes an object (the puzzle obsessed her) and turns passive with be (she was obsessed by it). The intransitive pattern, obsessed over or about something, is colloquial. It means thinking or talking about a thing compulsively, and it takes have in the perfect (critics have obsessed over it) but has no passive.

3. 3
   adjective

   Influenced or controlled by evil spirits acting upon a person from outside, a milder condition than possession because the spirits do not actually dwell within the victim.

   Like a besieging army camped outside the walls, harassing the city without ever breaching the gates.

   The exorcist concluded the boy was merely obsessed, not possessed, since the demon attacked him only from without.

   Medieval chronicles describe nuns who were obsessed by tormenting spirits through the long nights.

   Note

   Spiritualist and religious writing keeps a careful ladder here. A person may be obsessed or oppressed by spirits working from outside, and only possession puts the spirit within. The verb runs the same way: in E. W. Sprague's Spirit Obsession (1915), a spirit tries to obsess someone. Because the everyday "preoccupied" sense looks identical, context decides. Obsessed by evil spirits is this meaning; obsessed with the weather is not.

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