To admire and respect someone, often seeing them as a role model.
To admire and respect someone greatly, often because of their achievements, character, or wisdom, and to consider them an example worth following. If you look up to someone, you want to be more like them.
Type
Inseparable
Collocations
look up to a mentor — admire and respect someone
look up to someone's example — be inspired by how someone acts
always looked up to her — describes a long-standing admiration
⚠️ Watch out
Don't confuse with the literal 'look up' (to search for information) — 'look up to' specifically implies admiration and always needs 'to' before the person.
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In the winter of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, setting off a 381-day boycott that helped dismantle legal segregation on public transit in the United States. What is less often told is how Parks herself described her relationship with Claudette Colvin, a fifteen-year-old girl who had done the exact same thing nine months earlier, in March 1955, and was arrested for it. Colvin's act was {{deliberate|adjective|medium}} and {{courageous|adjective|easy}} — she {{cited|verb-various-tenses|medium}} the Constitution as officers {{dragged|verb-various-tenses|hard}} her from the bus. Parks, already a trained civil rights organizer with the NAACP, studied Colvin's case carefully and drew inspiration from the teenager's refusal to be moved by fear. Years later, Parks said that young people like Colvin reminded her what {{genuine|adjective|hard}} conviction without calculation looked like. Colvin, {{meanwhile|connective|easy}}, spent decades saying she looked up to Parks as the person who {{turned|verb-various-tenses|easy}} a local act of resistance into a national movement. {{So|connective|medium}}, their story is a quiet reminder that admiration between people who inspire each other — across ages, across roles — {{indeed|connective|hard}} is often what gives a cause its momentum, and that to {{look up to|phrasal-verb|medium}} someone can run in both directions at once.
To admire or respect someone means to regard them highly because of their qualities, achievements, or character, often seeing them as a role model worth emulating.
Type
Transitive verb phrase
Collocations
genuinely admire and respect — used to add sincerity and emphasis
widely admired and respected — passive form indicating broad recognition
admire and respect someone for — introduces the specific reason or quality
come to admire and respect — describes a feeling that developed gradually over time
publicly admire and respect — used in media or professional contexts to indicate open acknowledgement
⚠️ Watch out
Using only 'admire' without 'respect' can sometimes sound more emotional or aesthetic, while 'respect' alone can feel more formal or detached — combining both captures the full meaning of the phrasal verb. Avoid overusing the pairing in a single text, as repetition can feel mechanical rather than natural.
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Daniel had worked in journalism for three years before he finally met the editor whose work had shaped his entire career. He had admired and respected her long before they were ever in the same room — her reporting on the 2015 refugee crisis had shown him what the job could be at its best. When they finally sat across from each other at a conference in Vienna, he told her so directly. She smiled and said that she, too, admired and respected the journalists who had taught her. "It goes in a chain," she told him. "You carry it forward." He wrote that down.
The Quiet Influence of a Good Teacher
When journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates gave a talk at Howard University last spring, he spent less time discussing his books than most people expected. Instead, he talked about the teachers who had changed the direction of his life — the ones who made him feel that ideas were worth fighting for.
It was a reminder that the people we most admire and respect are rarely the loudest voices in the room. They are often the ones who showed up consistently, asked the right questions, and held a standard without needing recognition for doing so.
This pattern appears across industries. In a recent study of high-performing professionals, researchers at the University of Michigan found that nearly 70 percent credited a specific mentor or educator as the primary influence on their career trajectory. The qualities cited were strikingly similar across fields: honesty, follow-through, and the ability to challenge without undermining.
Those who work in education have long understood this dynamic. But it is worth stating clearly in a broader context: the people others genuinely admire and respect tend to model behaviour more than they prescribe it. They do not tell you who to be. They show you what is possible.
In professional contexts, 'hold in high regard' means to have deep admiration and respect for a colleague, mentor, or leader, often because of their expertise, integrity, or professional achievements. It conveys that someone is viewed as a role model or a benchmark of excellence within an organisation.
Type
Transitive verb phrase
Collocations
hold someone in high regard — standard professional usage, typically followed by a person or group
widely held in high regard — adds emphasis; signals broad consensus within an organisation
hold in high regard for [reason] — extends the phrase to specify the grounds for admiration
continue to hold in high regard — signals enduring respect over time, common in reports and appraisals
mutually held in high regard — used when respect is reciprocal, often in partnership or contract contexts
⚠️ Watch out
Avoid using 'hold in high regard' reflexively (e.g. 'she holds herself in high regard') in professional writing, as this reads as arrogant rather than admiring. Be precise with the object — the phrase always requires a clearly identified person or group to function correctly in formal documents.
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When Nina joined the consulting firm as a graduate analyst, she quickly noticed how her colleagues spoke about Elena Marsh, the firm's Head of Strategy. People referenced Elena's decisions in meetings, cited her in presentations, and sought her opinion before major client pitches. It was clear that the entire team held Elena in high regard — not because of her title, but because of her track record and her genuine interest in developing others.
Nina requested a mentoring session with Elena after six months. By the end of their first conversation, she understood why. Elena was precise, generous with her knowledge, and deeply professional. Nina left the meeting knowing she had found someone she, too, would hold in high regard for years to come.
The annual Leadership Forum at Caldwell & Associates is always a significant moment in the company calendar — a chance for the organisation to reflect on the people who have shaped its direction over the preceding year. This year, the keynote address focused on what it means to lead with integrity in a rapidly changing industry.
At the centre of the evening's recognition was Daniel Osei, the firm's outgoing Managing Director. Over the course of seventeen years, Daniel had built a reputation that extended far beyond the walls of Caldwell. Clients referenced him in correspondence. Industry peers invited him to chair external panels. Internally, every tier of the organisation — from graduate trainees to board-level directors — held him in high regard for his principled approach to client relationships and his consistent willingness to advocate for his team during difficult negotiations.
In her closing remarks, the incoming CEO, Dr. Priya Natarajan, was careful to acknowledge not just Daniel's results, but his character. 'In this profession,' she said, 'we are fortunate when we encounter someone whom we can genuinely hold in high regard — not as a title, but as a standard.' The room responded with immediate and sustained applause.
In academic English, 'venerate / ascribe authority to' means to hold someone in profound admiration and respect, typically recognising them as a figure of intellectual, moral, or professional authority worthy of emulation. It conveys a formalised, often institutionalised regard for an individual's expertise or exemplary standing within a field or community.
Type
Transitive verb phrase ('venerate' as primary verb; 'ascribe authority to' as alternative verb phrase requiring a direct object)
Collocations
venerate canonical figures — used when referring to foundational thinkers in a discipline
ascribe authority to established scholars — common in sociology of knowledge and education research
widely venerated within the field — adverbial modification indicating broad disciplinary consensus
ascribe intellectual authority to — emphasises cognitive and epistemic dimensions of the regard
venerate as a role model — explicitly connects admiration to aspirational emulation
⚠️ Watch out
Writers should be careful not to use 'venerate' in contexts where mere professional respect or citation practice is intended, as the term carries connotations of near-reverent admiration that may overstate the relationship being described. Similarly, 'ascribe authority to' should be used precisely — it implies a deliberate attribution of legitimacy, so it is inappropriate as a synonym for simply citing or referencing an author.
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Dr Amara Osei had spent three years immersed in the sociology of scientific knowledge before she began to question something she had long taken for granted. Her entire cohort seemed to venerate Thomas Kuhn with an intensity that bordered on the uncritical — his framework cited reflexively, his limitations rarely examined. Her supervisor, Professor Harding, noticed. 'It is perfectly reasonable to ascribe authority to Kuhn for his contribution to paradigm theory,' she said during one supervision session, 'but scholarship advances precisely when we resist the urge to venerate rather than interrogate.' The remark stayed with Amara. By her final year, her thesis opened with a careful, respectful, and thoroughly critical reassessment of the very theorist her peers had treated as untouchable.
The question of why scholars venerate certain intellectual predecessors while consigning others to relative obscurity is one that the sociology of knowledge has only partially addressed. Citation analysis offers a quantitative window onto patterns of influence, but it cannot fully account for the affective and ideological dimensions of academic admiration — the degree to which entire generations of researchers model their thinking, their prose style, and even their professional identities on figures they have come to regard as foundational. This phenomenon is particularly visible at disciplinary boundaries, where the consolidation of a new field almost invariably involves the retrospective construction of a canon: a set of figures to whom subsequent scholars ascribe authority as a means of legitimising the field's intellectual genealogy. The process is rarely neutral. To ascribe authority to one thinker is, implicitly, to diminish the standing of others — a dynamic that has historically disadvantaged scholars from marginalised groups, whose contributions were overlooked in the formation of these founding narratives. Understanding how disciplines construct and sustain their hierarchies of esteem is therefore not merely an academic exercise; it is a matter with direct consequences for who gets to shape the questions a field considers worth asking.