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say it: lawng
long is an adjective, adverb and verb meaning "primarily temporal sense; being or indicating a relatively great or greater than average duration or passage of time or a duration as specified". It is pronounced /ˈlɔŋ/ — lawng. It carries 12 recorded senses.
primarily temporal sense; being or indicating a relatively great or greater than average duration or passage of time or a duration as specified
“a long life”
“a long boring speech”
“a long time”
“a long friendship”
“a long game”
“long ago”
“an hour long”
primarily spatial sense; of relatively great or greater than average spatial extension or extension as specified
“a long road”
“a long distance”
“contained many long words”
“ten miles long”
holding securities or commodities in expectation of a rise in prices
“is long on coffee”
“a long position in gold”
finance
(of speech sounds or syllables) of relatively long duration
“the English vowel sounds in `bate', `beat', `bite', `boat', `boot' are long”
phonetics
planning prudently for the future
“large goals that required farsighted policies”
“took a long view of the geopolitical issues”
for an extended time or at a distant time
“a promotion long overdue”
“something long hoped for”
“his name has long been forgotten”
“talked all night long”
“how long will you be gone?”
“arrived long before he was expected”
“it is long after your bedtime”
for an extended distance
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for long come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.