The word 合并 is formed by combining two independent characters, each contributing its core meaning to create a new, composite concept. The first character, 合, depicts a lid closing on a container, conveying ideas of joining, closing up, or uniting. The second, 并, originally represented two people standing side-by-side, signifying side-by-side existence, parallelism, or amalgamation. When placed together, their individual notions of "joining" and "standing together" fuse to express the single, more complex idea of "to merge" or "to amalgamate", the act of combining separate things into one unified entity.