The Chinese word 加仑 (jiālún) is a phonetic loanword, formed through the process of transliteration to represent the English unit of measurement "gallon". It is constructed by combining two characters, 加 (jiā) and 仑 (lún), which were selected solely for their phonetic approximation to the sounds "ga" and "lon", with no inherent semantic connection to liquid volume or measurement. This is a standard method in Chinese for importing foreign terms, where the meaning is carried entirely by the borrowed concept, while the characters provide a sound-based shell.