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I found this sentence and was wondering about the meaning of сровнялось. My guess: "He was all of 96 and a half, ...."

“Дедушка Джо был в семье самый старый. Ему сровнялось девяносто шесть с половиной лет, а это не так уж и мало. ”

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In your sentence the verb сровняться means "to reach the age of ..." This meaning is colloquial, in neutral standard speech this meaning is usually expressed by the verb исполняться, so "Ему сровнялось девяносто шесть с половиной лет" means "Ему исполнилось девяносто шесть с половиной лет."

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  • сровняться in that case definitely more correct, then исполнилось, because исполняется counts full years(usual), and in direction towards future в этом году(месяце) ему исполняется 97 . Сравнялось in that case just points on current fact, in situation where is hard to be sure about upcoming events.
    – MolbOrg
    May 26, 2014 at 16:39
  • @MolbOrg - Will you give any proof that исполняется counts full years?
    – Yellow Sky
    May 26, 2014 at 17:22
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    There is no proof. Russian Corpus has examples of non-integer number of years — admittedly, rare examples. "Исполняться" has a shade of reaching some threshold, which is not much used for half-years or something like "20 years and 4 months". but you can. Better, though, just use "будет" or "было". I would not advise anyone to use "сравняться" because it is a very rare word, and also is marked as vernacular and colloquial.
    – Shady_arc
    May 26, 2014 at 19:22
  • I have never heard it used with years, but Russian National Corpus has 13 such examples, which is literally 100 times less frequent than with "исполниться". Which probably correlates with the fact that "сравняться" is a rare word by itself (in the top of the most frequent Russian words it is somewhere about 18000-19000, very rare both in speech and in writing).
    – Shady_arc
    May 26, 2014 at 19:27
  • @MolbOrg For little kids parents are usually counting months, not years: "Нам исполнился год и два месяца".
    – Artemix
    May 27, 2014 at 2:50
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my guess, the word "сровнялось" is applied to approximate the speech to the style that grandpas, grandmas do use.
and is similiar to "he become aged to the (amount of years)"

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