Long time no see

For other uses, see Long time no see (disambiguation).
Look up long time no see in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

"Long time no see" is an English expression used as an informal greeting by people who have not seen each other for an extended period of time. The phrase is also acronymized as LTNS in Internet slang.[1]

Its origins in American English appear to stem from pidgin English,[2] and it is widely accepted as a fixed expression. The phrase is a multiword expression used within most varieties of Standard English.[3] It may derive ultimately from an English pidgin such as that spoken by Native Americans or Chinese, or as an imitation of such.[4]

  1. ^ "Definition of 'LTNS'".
  2. ^ "long (a.1 c)". Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. Retrieved September 7, 2010.
  3. ^ cited as an example by Attia, Mohammed A. (2006). "Accommodating Multiword Expressions in an Arabic LFG Grammar". In Salakoski, Tapio (Ed.) Fifth International Conference on Natural Language Processing, pp. 87–109. Springer. ISBN 3-540-37334-9.
  4. ^ Gandhi, Lakshmi (2014). "Who First Said 'Long Time, No See' And In Which Language?". Code Switch. NPR. Retrieved March 29, 2022.