How to avoid a line-exceeding statement in a description's item tag?

Question

Having a description like this:

\begin{description}
\item[One or several threads are operating concurrently on some data structure, which is bad because and also blablabla.]
\end{description}

How is it possible to avoid that this (admittedly long) tag is written to one line? I want it to line break. Currently it is written to one line and goes outside of the document :(

Answer 1

I really think this is not the intended purpose of \item[], but maybe using a \parbox would help:

\begin{description}
\item[\parbox{10em}{One or several threads are operating concurrently
on some data structure, which is bad because and also blablabla.}]
\end{description}

Answer 2

With enumitem:

\setlist[description]{style=unboxed}

(Syntax for 3.x. With 2.x use \setdescription). By default, LaTeX boxes description labels (in fact, all list labels), and style=unboxed does the obvious thing.

Answer 3

Two solutions that might be better suited to what you actually want to achieve. Just use itemize or use paragraphs instead:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\begin{document}
\begin{itemize}[label={}]
\bfseries
\item An extremely long description that is written in bold and so on which is long enough to wrap properly
\item Another item
\end{itemize}

Or you could just use paragraphs:

\paragraph{A very long item with lots of words in it and so on and then some normal text}

This text is normal
\end{document}

If you want the indentation as well, there are packages that can help there. (To have a collection of paragraphs indented more...)