The Chinese word 概率 (gàilǜ), meaning "probability", is a modern compound formed by combining two characters: 概 (gài), which carries meanings of "general", "approximate", or "outline", and 率 (lǜ), which means "rate", "ratio", or "proportion". The term is a semantic-phonetic loan translation (calque) of the Japanese word 確率 (kakuritsu), which was itself coined during the Meiji period to translate the Western mathematical concept of "probability". Thus, the construction logically fuses the idea of a generalized or approximate (概) rate or ratio (率), effectively capturing the essence of the statistical concept as the measure of the likelihood of an event occurring.