About
The character 崴 combines the mountain radical 山, visually and semantically linking it to rugged terrain, with the phonetic component 威. In its formal sense, it describes mountains as steep or jagged. In northern dialects, it developed a colloquial pronunciation and meaning: to sprain or twist, as an ankle or wrist, metaphorically relating the unevenness of a rocky path to the sudden injury. This secondary usage is now the most common in everyday speech.