One way to hold stabilizer: something is wobbling, and you bring in a second thing whose only job is to stop the wobble. Look at the second thing, not the first. It is usually small. It is usually added, not built in from the start. It does nothing visible when things are going well, and you only notice it when it is missing. A fin under a ship, two little wheels beside a back wheel, a of something in a sauce, a sheet of backing under cloth, a calm person in a room: different objects, one job.
From the word’s history
The packet's Wiktionary entry gives stabilizer as stabilize plus -er, and traces stabilize back to stable plus -ize. So the word is built to mean the thing that makes something stable, which is exactly the shared job across all its uses.
資料上寫 stabilizer 是 stabilize 加 -er，而 stabilize 是 stable 加 -ize。所以這個字造出來的意思就是「把東西弄穩的那個東西」，剛好就是它所有用法共有的那份工作。
Wiktionary entry for stabilizer supplied in this packet (source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1216460384), etymology tree stable > -ize > stabilize > -er > stabilizer.
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。