so long

American  

interjection

Informal.

1. goodbye.

   I said so long and left.

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so long British  

1. informal farewell; goodbye

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adverb

1. slang for the time being; meanwhile

so long Idioms  

1. Good-bye, as in So long, we'll see you next week. The allusion here is puzzling; long presumably means “a long time” and perhaps the sense is “until we meet again after a long time,” but the usage has no such implication. [Colloquial; first half of 1800s]

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Etymology

Origin of so long

An Americanism dating back to 1840–50

Example Sentences

Not so long ago, tattered old maps of Africa’s most remote mining regions would conjure up images of Allan Quatermain cutting his way deep into the jungle in search of King Solomon’s Mines.

From The Wall Street Journal

After the Forum show, I understood why it’s taking them so long to finish a new LP.

From Los Angeles Times

“It’s really stressful. Because I don’t have a lot of money and I was a single mother for so long, I’m very careful about my budget — I keep spreadsheets.”

From MarketWatch

Ultimately it matters not how or where you write; as Virginia Woolf put it, “so long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters.”

From The Wall Street Journal

Why couldn’t the complexity have been the dialogue from the beginning, instead of the play-dumb cartoon “The AI Doc” feels like for so long?

From Los Angeles Times

Related Words

• goodbye
• send-off
• sendoff