Grammar
N에 달하다 / N에 그치다
Meaning
AdvancedN e dalhada / N e geuchida
A matched pair of verbs that measure and judge in the same breath. N에 달하다 says a figure has reached N and treats that as a lot; N에 그치다 says it stopped at N and treats that as a little. The judgement is not in the number — it is the writer's, which is what lets one sentence carry both and tell the reader how to read an imbalance without any opinion being stated outright: 찬성은 70%에 달한 반면 반대는 12%에 그쳤습니다. 그치다 is the ordinary verb for stopping (비가 그치다) and keeps that sense here: the count got as far as N and no further.
Form
Both take a noun of quantity plus 에 — 70%에 달하다, 12%에 그치다 — and that noun is an amount, a rate, a headcount or a sum rather than a place. 달하다 is a 하다 verb (달했다, 달한, 달할 것으로 보인다) and often has 무려 in front of the figure for emphasis: 무려 3조 원에 달했습니다. 그치다 conjugates regularly (그쳤다, 그친, 그치는) and can also take a clause through 데: 소폭 오르는 데 그쳤습니다. Both are written as separate words after the amount, and neither belongs to casual speech — this is report and news register.
Examples
찬성은 70%에 달한 반면 반대는 12%에 그쳤습니다.
Support reached 70 percent, whereas opposition stopped at 12.
Common mistakes & nuance
What this pair adds is stance, not precision. The same 12% can be written 12%에 그쳤다 in one paper and 12%에 달했다 in another, and both sentences are factually true; what changed is the size the writer wants you to see in the figure. So read 달하다 as 'as much as' and 그치다 as 'only', and keep the number itself apart from the verdict passed on it — the verdict is the part that can be argued with. Two smaller points. The pair almost always sits inside a contrast frame (반면, -(으)ㄴ/는 데 반해, 한편), so meeting one of them is a cue to go looking for the other in the same sentence. And 그치다 in its plain sense means to stop or cease, so 12%에 그쳤다 is not saying that anything came to a halt; the counting simply went no higher.
Similar grammar
- N에 이르다
이르다 and 달하다 are the closest neighbours here, and news uses both for a figure arriving at a level. 이르다 is the wider word: besides amounts it takes states and points in time (심각한 수준에 이르다, 합의에 이르다, 새벽에 이르러서야), where 달하다 is not used. 달하다 stays with quantities and leans harder on how big the figure is, which is exactly why it is the one that pairs off against 그치다 in a single sentence.
- N 넘게
넘게 reports, 달하다 evaluates. 백 명 넘게 왔습니다 says only that the true figure is somewhere above a hundred, and it can be perfectly neutral; 백 명에 달했습니다 says the count went all the way to a hundred and presents that as a lot. There is an arithmetic difference too — 넘게 excludes the number it follows, while a figure 에 달한 is that number as reported.