longs

1. 1
   nounplural

   Full-length pants that reach the ankles, in contrast to shorts.

   She packed a pair of longs in case the mountain nights got chilly.

   The dress code required longs on the factory floor, never shorts.

   Similartrousers, pants, slacks

   Oppositeshorts

   Note

   A clothing word that exists only in the plural, like trousers: you wear longs or a pair of longs, never a long. It is defined against shorts, and the two often appear side by side. A 1957 kit list in Boys' Life counts one pair of shorts, one pair of longs and even "pajama longs". Clement Mesenas's The Last Great Strike (2013) dresses a character in longs of coarse khaki.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of long.

   The old sailor longs for one more voyage across the open sea.

   Every exile longs for the place that shaped their childhood.

   Note

   The same -s form serves two very different verbs. The yearning verb is intransitive, so it needs a preposition or an infinitive: she longs for home, he longs to leave. The trader's verb is transitive and takes its asset directly: a fund that longs the yen has taken a long position in it. An archaic use meaning "belongs to" turns up only in older writing.

   The desk longs the yen whenever the central bank hints at a rate rise.

   She longs to see the coast again before winter.

3. 3
   noun

   Plural of long.

   The fund opened a string of longs on emerging-market currencies.

   He closed out his longs before the markets dropped on Friday.

   Note

   One spelling serves the plural of several specialist nouns. A trader's longs are positions held in an asset, or long-dated bonds. A prosodist's longs are long syllables or vowels. In early music they are notes worth two breves, and a programmer's longs are integer variables. Context settles which is meant. None of these is related to the word for full-length trousers, which exists only in the plural.

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