Other forms: longer, longest, longing, longs
Long means measuring a lot from one end to the other. A snake, the queue at passport control, the corridor at school, hair that reaches your waist.
Long measures time as well as distance, and time is the commoner use: a long film, a long winter, how long have you been waiting? It takes measurements straight after the number — two metres long, an hour long. As an adverb it means for a long time: do not stay long, long before you were born. There is a verb too, to long for something, which means to want it painfully, and the noun from it is longing. Watch the pair long and tall — a road is long, a man is tall, and a long man is a mistake.
1adjectivelongMeasuring a lot from one end to the other.~42%
“She has long dark hair and a long stride.”
synonyms: lengthy, extended
2adjectivelengthyLasting a great deal of time.~42%
“It was a long wait at the airport.”
synonyms: lengthy, drawn-out, protracted
3adverbgreatFor a great deal of time.~14%
“He had known the truth long before anyone told him.”
4verbwantTo want something very much, especially something out of reach.~2%
“He longed for a proper cup of tea.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Long is a word English never had to borrow. Old English lang meant long, tall or lasting, and the same word runs through Dutch and German lang, Swedish lång and Gothic laggs, all from Proto-Germanic *langaz. Behind them sits Proto-Indo-European *dlongʰos, which also surfaces in Latin longus — so English long and French long are ancient cousins who met again much later.
Middle English
long
English, today
long
Built from
From Middle English long. From Middle English long, lang, from Old English long, lang (“long, tall, lasting”), from Proto-West Germanic lang, from Proto-Germanic langaz (“long”), from Proto-Indo-European dlongʰos (“long”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA