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In the long run

Idiomatic Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Considering eventual outcomes rather than immediate effects; over an extended period, after all factors have played out.

Detailed Definition
This temporal idiom asks the reader to postpone judgment, to resist the clarity of the immediate in favor of a longer arc of assessment. In poetry, it appears in philosophical verse about patience, consequence, and the unreliability of short-term perspective. Poets invoke it to examine how meanings, actions, and choices look different when viewed from sufficient distance—whether that distance is consoling or devastating. It resonates in elegies, where what seemed catastrophic proves generative in hindsight, and in political poetry, where the long run of history judges what seemed pragmatic as reckless or cruel. The phrase honors poetry's own temporal logic: poems survive their moment and acquire meaning across decades of rereading that their authors could not have anticipated.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about the slow revelation of meaning that follows loss might use in the long run to describe how grief, intolerable in the immediate, transforms over years into something that can be carried; T.S. Eliot's sense of time — the past not passed but present, the future contained in the now — is organized around a version of in the long run: the poet who insists that momentary experience must be understood within larger temporal frames; In a political poem about the judgment of history, in the long run is the appeal over the heads of contemporary opinion to a court whose verdict cannot yet be known; A poem about environmental damage might use in the long run to describe the slow revelation of cost — the immediate economic gain visible in the short term, the long-run damage not yet apparent to those whose planning horizon is the quarterly report; In a love poem about a relationship that looked unsuccessful to observers but, in the long run, proved the most sustaining thing in the speaker's life, the phrase serves as a gentle correction of premature judgment; The phrase suits poems about the relationship between living and understanding — the recognition that experience must be lived through before it can be comprehended, that the long run of retrospection is the only reliable perspective on what the short-term could not see clearly
Additional Notes
This phrase invites a long view beyond immediate reward or pain. In poetry, it suits meditation on time, ageing, moral consequence, education, love, or history. It often contrasts short-term loss with eventual meaning. Related images include roads, seasons, seeds, tides, and the slow unfolding by which choices reveal their true cost or value.
Also Known As
Eventually Over time
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