an entrusted charge: a directive God has personally laid on his people as their assigned duty.
This word names one of the eight terms the Psalms use for God's revealed instruction (alongside law, testimony, statute, command, judgment, word, and saying). What sets it apart is its flavor rather than a separate sphere of meaning. It comes from a verb whose core idea is to entrust, commit, or appoint something to someone's care, so the noun points to a charge that has been handed over: not just a rule on a page, but a responsibility placed in your keeping that you are now answerable to carry out. A close relative of the word is used for a deposit left in trust, and a near-identical word in the older language of the region meant "an assignment or commission of office." That is the feel of it: marching orders given by someone with the authority to give them.
The traditional English rendering, "precept," comes by way of the Latin of Jerome, who deliberately kept this word distinct from the ordinary word for "command" (מצוה). The older Greek translation had blurred the two together, and Jerome restored the difference. Modern translators are split: some keep precepts, others prefer orders or decrees to bring out that note of authoritative appointment.
In practice every occurrence sits in worship poetry, almost always in the plural and almost always as God's: your charges, his charges. Most scholars who study Psalm 119 closely conclude that there the eight words for God's instruction are used interchangeably, woven together for the poem's rhythm and devotion rather than to mark off eight separate legal categories. So the wise reading holds two things together: the word carries its own distinctive coloring (a charge entrusted), yet in the Psalms that coloring blends into one rich, repeated portrait of everything God has made known and asks of his people.