The word 天气 (tiānqì, meaning "weather") is formed by the direct semantic combination of its two component characters: 天 (tiān), meaning "sky" or "heaven", and 气 (qì), meaning "air", "vapor", or "energy". It is a compound where the concepts are placed together to create a new, intuitive meaning, literally "sky-air", which naturally points to the atmospheric conditions and phenomena observed in the sky, thus giving us the general concept of "weather".