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What does こと mean in this sentence? (This sentence is from an electronic
dictionary called "JDict"
play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ndcsolution.jdict. The word
segmentation is mine.)

(1)

> 彼 は 長い **こと** 歩いて 疲れていた  
>  kare wa nagai **koto** aruite tsukareteita  
>  'He was tired from his long walk'

First, from what I have [learned](https://www.japanistry.com/nominalising-
verbs/) so far, こと is basically a word meaning "thing" or "matter", and also
is often used a nominalizer.

In the many examples that I have been able to check in (Kaiser et al. 2013),
most of the time こと is indeed a simple nominalizer, followed by a particle (は,
が, or を) indicating the syntactic role of the noun it forms with the element
it is attached to.

Secondly, [here](https://cotoacademy.com/how-to-use-koto-japanese-different-
uses/) I saw that こと can be used to express many modal or existential meanings
such as "I must do", "I decided" "there is", etc.

However, in sentence (1), こと follows an adjective and is followed by a verb.

い adjectives are adverbialized by く. Here, why don't we have **長く** 歩いて疲れていた,
for instance?

**References**

Kaiser, S., Ichikawa, Y., Kobayashi, N., & Yamamoto, H. (2003). Japanese: A
comprehensive grammar. Routledge.
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grammar
Adj + こと + Verb-て ( 彼は長いこと歩いて疲れていた)
> い adjectives are adverbialized by く

Yes, but they can also be adverbialized by adding a こと after them. Take these
examples from 三省堂国語辞典 and 大辞林:

> うまいことやれよ / Do it well.  
> 早いことやってしまえ / Get it done as soon as you can.

This adverbialization use of こと is listed separately in all the dictionaries I
referred to, and 明鏡国語辞典 takes a step further to list it as one of こと's
grammatical usages (文型表現). Hope you enjoy こと's different usages coming up
along the way you learn Japanese!
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「長い間 nagai aida (long time)」is formal expression, I think. 「長いこと」is casual. If
the sentence is 「長いこと」only, we can't find what is 「こと」 time or things. But
in「長いこと歩く」,「こと」means time in this case.
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