Lifelong means lasting the whole of somebody's life. A lifelong friend, a lifelong interest, lifelong learning.
It is used most in claims about loyalty: a lifelong supporter is a boast, and a lifelong friend is a status. Lifelong learning is the policy phrase for education after school, and it is one of those terms nobody argues with and few fund.
1adjectivelifelongLasting the whole of somebody's life.
“Her lifelong love of horses began when she was given a pony as a child.”
lifelong is a duration.
Proto-Indo-European
*leyp-
Middle English
lyf
English
life
English, today
lifelong
Built from
From life + -long. life comes from Middle English lyf. From Middle English lyf, from Old English līf, from Proto-West Germanic līb, from Proto-Germanic lībą (“life, body”), from lībaną (“to remain, stay, be left”), from Proto-Indo-European leyp- (“to stick, glue”). Cognate with Scots life, leif (“life”), stq Lieuw (“body”), West Frisian liif (“body”), cim laip (“body”), Dutch lijf (“body”) and leven (“life”), German Leib (“body; womb”) and Leben (“life”), Low German Lief (“body; life”), lb Leif, Läif (“body”), wym łaowa (“life”), Yiddish לײַב (“body”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish liv (“life; waist”), Faroese lív (“life”), Icelandic líf (“life”). Related to belive.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA