long run
in the long run (idiom)
/ɪn ðə lɑːŋ rʌn/
Meaning
- Over a long period of time, when the final outcome matters more than the present cost or trouble.
- Eventually, or in the end, after events have run their course.
- When future costs, savings, or effects are added up, often in money, health, work, or policy.
Synonyms: eventually, ultimately, in the end, in time, over time, finally, in the long term.
Example Sentences
- The mattress cost more than Mike wanted to spend, but the better sleep and fewer sore mornings made it worth it in the long run.
- Sarah hated the late shifts at first, yet the experience quietly set her up for a supervisor job in the long run.
- Skipping the roof repair looked like a smart save this month, but the leak that followed cost the owner more in the long run.
- The fund manager told clients to stay put for the long run instead of jumping out at the first dip.
Etymology and Origin
The long run grew up in England, built from two plain English words, long and run. Nobody imported it ready-made. French has a near idea in à la longue, which also means over the long stretch, but the English phrase found its own way there, from an older habit of saying that things keep running until they reach an end.
An older formula of running
The thought is older than the wording we use now. In the Regiment of Princes, written by Thomas Hoccleve about 1412, a later manuscript keeps the line “At long rennyng, loue best schal preue,” meaning love proves itself best after a long running. In 1528, William Roy and Jerome Barlow used the same pattern in Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe:
“Their interrupcion Shall tourne to their destruccion At longe runnynge fynally.”
The point is already the modern one. What looks fine at the start may not hold once the course is finished.
The compound takes shape
The fixed noun long run, meaning the final outcome, shows up in print in the early 1600s. The earliest known evidence is from 1607, in the writing of Thomas Rogers, a Church of England clergyman and religious controversialist. A clear example of the older preposition follows in 1627, in John Carter’s A Plain Exposition, which has “at the long run.” On 17 September 1656, Oliver Cromwell used the same form in a speech, saying the discontented “must end at the interest of the Cavalier at the long run.” Scottish writers had their own versions, lang run and langrin, with the same sense of at last.
From at to in
At the long run, and sometimes on or upon the long run, was the usual early wording. In the long run became the everyday form later. It is already in early eighteenth-century print, including a pamphlet of 1703 written in the dispute over Daniel Defoe’s The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters. By the nineteenth century the newer wording had settled in. Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote in 1842 that compromises “never are found to answer, I think, in the long run.” The short run, as the opposite, is a later pairing and is not recorded until the 1800s.
What the image meant
Two explanations are usually offered, and they sit well together. One takes run as the course of events: in the long run means after things have run their full course. The other takes it as a race, where a runner who is behind early can still finish ahead if the distance is long, much as the slow tortoise outlasts the hare. Horse racing and early machinery have also been suggested, but those are later guesses. The Middle English rennyng lines point to a general picture of a long course, not to one sport or trade.
A famous later use
The phrase stayed ordinary until economics made one sentence famous. In A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), chapter 3, page 80, John Maynard Keynes wrote, “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.” He was answering the claim that an economy would fix itself if people only waited. His point was that waiting out a storm is a poor guide when people have to live through it. The line is often quoted as if he had dismissed the future. In context, he was saying the short run matters too.
A small curiosity
George Eliot paired both time frames in a letter of 18 October 1879: “Mrs. Healy’s marriage is surely what you expected in the long or short run.” The joke only works because both phrases were already familiar. Keynes’s line later did the opposite work. It turned a common English time phrase into a warning about patience itself.
Variants
- over the long run
- for the long run
- in the long term
- in the long haul
- at the long run
- in the short run
Similar Idioms
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