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Is there a word for describing a period of time that feels much longer than it actually is?
To fill in the blanks below for example
Only few days have passed but it feels like months. How ___ .
The time we spent on the island has been ___ . It is as if we'd lived there for years.
Reading the source code is quite a ___ task.
When time feels like it is passing slower than usual, we usually say that it is dragging:
2 (of time) pass slowly and tediously.
’the day dragged—eventually it was time for bed’
I don’t think it’s quite the single word you were looking for, but in conjunction with “time” it can fill the blank in all your examples.
It does have fairly negative connotations; we often used stretched in more positive situations. E.g.:
“The long summer days stretched out, so by the autumn it felt like we hadn’t been to school in years.”
The typical metaphor would be an eternity. The other way, possibly cliché, is [for] what seemed like an eternity.
Glacial is frequently used in just this way.
"suggestive of the very slow movement of glaciers ·progress on the bill has been glacial"(MW)
Interestingly, there is a concept in fictional narrative that may also be useful. If a long segment of the text is devoted to a short period of the story, it is called deceleration. So a decelerated event has a short duration in time but extends for an inordinate amount of text compared to the normal event time/text length for the narrative. Narrative Fiction, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Routledge.
In more general use, "The event decelerated as the week progressed."
The time we spent on the island has decelerated. It is as if we'd lived there for years.
Simple as it is, you could just use "slow" or any of its synonyms.
"How slow."
"has been slow"
"a slow task"
I'd argue that "time is slow" implies that the period of time seems longer than it actually is, since we're all aware that time isn't literally being slow (unless this is sci-fi, or something).
