What 쯤 means
It means “about” or “around,” attached to the phrase before it. Its job is to turn an exact-looking time, amount, count, or question into a rough one.
Write 3시쯤, not 3시 쯤. 정도 has a similar meaning but stays separate; 약 and 한 come before the number. That makes spacing the practical distinction.
This form evolved rather than arriving as one inventor's sign. The related form 즈음 had a concrete spatial sense in medieval Korean; 즘 appeared in the late 18th century, ㅅ즘 and ᄶᅳᆷ in the late 19th century, and modern 쯤 in the early 20th century, when its role became abstract approximation.
Part of the collection
Who writes 쯤
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What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsA rough time: 3시쯤 means “around three.”
Related characters
2
Questions people ask
1Why does 쯤 show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
More like this
11
How to type or find 쯤
- Also called
- -쯤 · jjeum
- Search it as
- about · around · approximately · roughly · suffix · approximation · grammar
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
쯤\CBE4Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.