lengthy

adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,450 of 15,258mostly written

Lengthy means going on much longer than usual. Long, with a complaint attached.

That complaint is the difference, since a long meeting is a description and a lengthy one is a judgement, and the word is nearly always faintly weary. It attaches to meetings, delays, explanations and legal processes. It describes duration far more often than physical length, where long is the natural word. Protracted is the formal equivalent and drawn-out is the informal one.

Definitions of lengthy

1adjectivelengthyLasting a long time, often tediously so.C1
“There was a lengthy discussion about the wording.”

Where it comes from

Proto-Germanic
*langiþō
Proto-West Germanic
*langiþu
Old English
lengþ
Middle English
lengthe
English
length
English, today
lengthy

From length + -y. length comes from Middle English lengthe, from Old English lengþ, lengþu, from Proto-West Germanic langiþu, from Proto-Germanic langiþō, equivalent to long + th. Cognate with Scots lenth, lainth (“length”), stq Loangte (“length”), West Frisian lingte, langte (“length”), Dutch lengte (“length”), German Low German Längde, Längd, Längte, Längt (“length”), Danish længde (“length”), Swedish längd (“length”), Icelandic lengd (“length”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 5 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

lengthy in the wild

Most of the entries consist of only one paragraph but some entries, like William Shakespeare's, are quite lengthy.
A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature
There was a lengthy process with IANA to get the.nr domain approved and assigned at the time.
.nr
After that competition, they began a lengthy and successful professional career.
Paul Martini
The site is frequently offline with no explanation, and for lengthy periods of time.
WebCite
The Chinese players returned following a lengthy absence.
1971 World Table Tennis Championships

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the lengþ family

length

lengthy — used about once every 4,601 pages · #9,450 · point at the bar for the others

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