Chinese character for mare

It means “mare,” a female horse. In Mandarin, it sounds roughly like “kuh” with a falling tone; Pinyin, the standard way to write Mandarin sounds, spells it kè. 騍馬 names a mare. Dictionaries also record the character in terms for female mules, donkeys, or camels.

騍 is the traditional form; simplified Chinese writes the same word as 骒.

Where did 騍 come from?

Its written form follows changing horse terms. Before the Tang period, sources call a mare 草馬. In the Tang period, horse administration used 課馬 for mares whose foals were assessed. A traditional explanation connects 騍 to that term and uses the horse component 馬 in the later spelling.

The earliest dictionary entry for the mare sense is in the Jin period dictionary 新修玉篇. A character on a Warring States bamboo writing slip was proposed as 騍, but that reading is not accepted as the mare word.