long tail

noun

1. commerce the segment of a market representing the large number of products that sell in small quantities, considered by some to be of greater financial value than the few products that sell in very large quantities

Word History and Origins

Origin of long tail¹

C21: from the appearance of typical sales patterns on a graph

Example Sentences

Usually, gas and dust from the coma stream away to create a long tail that can stretch for millions of kilometers as the comet nears the Sun.

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Stretched over six episodes, it’s not a speedy telling, and, in fact, a second series covering a long tail of aftermath has already aired in the U.K.

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Patricia Lockwood, poet and author of the prizewinning memoir “Priestdaddy,” evokes the pandemic’s long tail in her expressionistic autofiction, “Will There Ever Be Another You,” recounting mind-altering effects on her protagonist, “Patricia,” as she and her husband quarantine in Savannah, Ga., during the initial 2020 outbreak and subsequent surges.

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“And as such, we only focus on the acute period in which the wildfires were burning in Los Angeles. But we hope that there will be further research to evaluate the long tail of these wildfires.”

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"I figured it'd be a quick spike and then fade away, but it's had this weird and pretty unheard of long tail, where rather than falling off into nothing, it fell off and then slowly ramped back up. And it just seems to keep going."

Read more on BBC