The building blocks of English
Affixes
-some2
A group of a specified number.
Old English sum, some.
Examples are twosome, threesome, foursome, and eightsome, (in all of which the ending is pronounced /s@m/). Particularly in American English, the ending can be added to larger numbers to suggest ‘approximately’: twenty-some, forty-some, as in fifty-some people were there. In these cases, the suffix is said as though it were a separate word: /sVm/. See also ‑something.
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