How do you drop the last part of a number, which is of less importance?
Suppose you want to say a number to someone, but you do not want to read it out entirely because the last part of the number is unimportant (at least to your audience). For instance, you want to mention you waited one hour and something and something could be anything between one and 59 minutes. Of course, if it is one hour and 50 minutes then you may say I waited around two hours. This is not what I am looking for. I want my audience to know that it is more than one hour but less than two and it does not matter how much it is (Perhaps, you intentionally don't want to give extra information).
In some cases, you may want to say a number in a similar manner. For example, consider the following numbers:
1.234 (you don't want to mention 0.234)
2115 (you don't want to mention 115)
1,345,000 (you don't want to mention 345,000)
What is (are) the common word/expression(s) to use in such situations?
Solution 1:
If you're not speaking or writing formally, you can use "odd".
He's sixty-odd years old.
It cost fifty-odd thousand dollars.
He has two-thousand-odd chickens on his farm.
A million-odd people live in San Jose.
I don't find it idiomatic for single-digit numbers like "one" or "two". So I wouldn't recommend saying:
*We waited two-odd hours.
(Although Google does find a few hits for "two-odd hours".)