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骘 began as a term for a male horse or stallion, used specifically in historical equestrian vocabulary. The traditional character 騭 is a phono-semantic compound: the semantic part 馬 (horse) classifies the animal, and the phonetic part 陟 (zhì, 'to climb') supplies the pronunciation. In simplified Chinese, 骘 reduces 馬 to its simplified radical 马 while the phonetic 陟 remains unchanged. The meaning later expanded from the literal stallion to abstract verbs of evaluating, determining, and stabilizing, commonly applied when establishing order or assessing people and affairs. This evolution from a concrete animal to conceptual acts shows a metaphorical shift in usage.
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