The modern Chinese term 几何 (jǐhé), meaning "geometry," is formed through a process of semantic and phonetic borrowing from Western languages via Japanese during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Japanese scholars first used the existing Chinese characters 幾何—which in classical Chinese literally meant "how much" or "how many"—to phonetically approximate the first syllable "ge-" of the Western word "geometry" (from Greek "geometria," meaning "earth measurement") while also cleverly retaining the characters' original connotation of measurement and quantity. This Japanese-coined term, pronounced *kika*, was then re-imported into Chinese as a ready-made, culturally congruent loanword, where it took on its specialized mathematical meaning, effectively displacing earlier translations like 形学 (xíngxué, "study of forms").