Worshipful love and deep reverence.
Worshipful love and deep reverence — rapt, exalting admiration.
The worshipful pole: its root means literally “to worship,” and that reverential, gazing-upward quality persists even in secular use (“looked at the baby in adoration”). More intense and emotionally rapt than admiration, and suffused with love and awe where admiration is primarily cognitive esteem. Compared with devotion (enacted as loyal service), adoration is a state of feeling and gazing rather than of doing.
1540s “act of paying divine honors,” from Latin adoratio, from adorare “to worship,” literally “to call to / pray to” (ad- “to” + orare “speak formally, pray”).
Entered English in its strict worship sense and stayed near the reverential end. The verb adore drifted further — from “worship” (late 14c.) to “honor highly” (1590s) to the weakened “be very fond of” (1880s) — but the noun adoration kept its worshipful coloring. No reliable recent-generation shift.