The word 公众 is formed by combining two conceptual building blocks: the character 公, which carries the core idea of "common", "shared", or "collective", and the character 众, which embodies the concept of a "multitude" or "many people". It is a semantic compound where the meaning of the whole is derived from the fusion of these two ideas. The formation is ideographic, picturing the notion of a "shared multitude", effectively creating the single, unified concept of "the public" or "general populace".