The Chinese word "史密斯" is formed entirely through a process of phonetic transliteration, specifically to represent the sound of the English surname "Smith". Each character is chosen not for its meaning, but for how closely its pronunciation in Mandarin approximates a syllable of the foreign name: "Shǐ" (史) for "Smi", "mì" (密) for the "th" sound, and "sī" (斯) for a final trailing "s" sound. Consequently, the compound's formation disregards the semantic content of the individual characters (which historically mean "history", "secret/dense", and "this" respectively), creating a unified phonetic loanword whose sole function is to sound like its foreign counterpart.