Some [number] [plural noun] means "approximately [number] [plural noun]". For example:
Some seven speakers preceded me, so no one listened to my speech.
= About seven speakers preceded me, so no one listened to my speech.
He had some thirty jellybeans and threw up.
= He had about thirty jellybeans and threw up.
Some [plural noun] means (roughly) "more than one [noun]". For example:
Some speakers preceded me, so no one listened to my speech.
= A number of speakers preceded me, so no one listened to my speech.
He had some jellybeans and threw up.
= He had jellybeans and threw up.
But some words that mean numbers aren't syntactically numbers (numerals) but instead nouns, like dozen and score and hundred and quintillion and googol: a dozen eggs, two score years, several hundred people, a few quintillion seconds, but no *a two eggs, *two three years, *several four people, or *a few five seconds.
What does some [that kind of word] [plural noun] mean? For example:
Some dozen speakers preceded me, so no one listened to my speech.
He had some hundred jellybeans and threw up.
Does some have the meaning in these sentences that it normally does before a number, "approximately", or that it normally has before a plural noun, "more than one"? In other words, do those example sentences mean:
About a dozen speakers preceded me, so no one listened to my speech.
He had about a hundred jellybeans and threw up.
— or do they mean:
Dozens of speakers preceded me, so no one listened to my speech.
He had hundreds of jellybeans and threw up.
—? (But of course those are just two example sentences: I'm asking about words like dozen and hundred in general.)
Best Answer
In some cases, at least, some dozen means "some twelve", not "some number of dozens":
And while searching for the above, I also found this paragraph making the same claim:
Here are some examples with hundred, thousand, etc., that also seem to have this same sense:
Also perhaps relevantly, the decline of some dozen, some hundred, and some thousand over the past 150 years correlates pretty well with the decline of the unambiguous some half dozen (see Google Books Ngram).
None of the above, however, demonstrates that some dozen/hundred/etc. never means "some number of dozens/hundreds/etc.". So the phrase could still be ambiguous. But I've found only one case where it does seem to mean that:
and the more I think about this case, the more I think it does actually mean something like "28,100 or so", with the same sense as the above example.