The states in a long supermultiplet may be produced from a representative by the action of the lowering and raising operators, assuming that for any basis vector, either the lowering operator or its conjugate raising operator produce a new nonzero state. This is the reason for the dimension indicated above. On the other hand, the short supermultiplets admit a subset of supercharges that annihilate the whole representation. That is why the short supermultiplets contain the BPS states, another description of the same concept.