to be long or to make long, in time or in space: to prolong, lengthen, extend, or hold off.
At its core this word is about length. Something is long, or someone makes it long, and that one idea reaches across very different settings. It can be the length of a life, the length of a stay, the length of a cord or a wooden pole, or the length of time a person waits before letting anger loose.
Most often it describes prolonging life. This is the language of the promise attached to honoring parents and keeping the covenant: that your days may be long in the land. Because the same word covers so much ground, English Bibles translate it many ways, prolong, lengthen, defer, tarry, draw out, and a reader can easily miss that these are all the one Hebrew verb.
One use is worth singling out. When the object is anger, to make it long means to hold it back, to be slow to lose one's temper. This is the picture behind the biblical idea of patience: not that anger never comes, but that a person keeps a long distance between themselves and it.