Grammar
N여
Meaning
IntermediateN yeo
여 is the Sino-Korean 餘 ('surplus'), attached to a number to say that the real figure is that number and something on top: 80여 점 is eighty-odd works, 20여 명 twenty-odd people. Its direction is fixed — what 여 adds is a remainder, so the true count is at or above the printed number and never below it. And it goes on round numbers only, which is what it is for: the writer has kept the leading digits and dropped the tail, rather than confessing to not knowing the count.
Form
여 attaches directly to the numeral with no space, and the counter follows after a space: 80여 점, 20여 명, 100여 개, 3만여 명. The numeral is Sino-Korean (80여 is read 팔십여) and it is always a round one — ending in zero, or a unit such as 만 or 억 — because 여 stands in for the digits that were dropped; 23여 명 is not written. With a stretch of time Korean also puts 여 after the counter: 1년여, 6개월여, 3주일여 read as a year and a bit, six months and a bit. What 여 does not do is drift to the end of the whole phrase — a count is 20여 명, never 20명여.
Examples
작품 80여 점을 선보입니다.
About eighty works are on show.
Common mistakes & nuance
Three things to watch. First, direction: 여 only ever adds, so a figure carrying it is a floor. 약 20명 ('about twenty') can turn out to be eighteen; 20여 명 cannot. Second, how much is hidden: because 여 sits on a round number and replaces the digits below it, 20여 명 reads as twenty-something and so as short of thirty, and 3만여 명 as thirty-something thousand and short of forty. That bound is a reading convention rather than a stated rule, so treat it as the sense a Korean reader takes, not as arithmetic you can hold the writer to. Third, do not read it as the writer's uncertainty — 여 is how a known figure gets shortened for reading, which is why the exact number often appears elsewhere in the same article or in the table beneath it. In native-word register 남짓 does a similar job (한 시간 남짓).
Similar grammar
- N 넘게
Both put the true figure above a stated number, but they attach differently and claim differently. 넘게 follows the whole quantity and modifies the verb (백 명 넘게 왔습니다), and it names no ceiling at all — 백 명 넘게 could be three hundred. 여 sits inside the number, in front of the counter (100여 명), and the digit it stands in for caps how much can be hiding: a hundred-odd, not three hundred.
- N에 달하다 / N에 그치다
Different jobs on the same figure, and they stack. 여 changes how precisely the number is written and says nothing about whether it is big; 달하다 and 그치다 leave the number alone and pass judgement on its size. So 20여 명에 그쳤습니다 is doing both at once — twenty-odd people, and the writer calling that few.