The word 屠杀 is formed through the vivid, conceptual combination of two characters: 屠, which originally depicted the systematic slaughtering of livestock, implying a large-scale, almost industrial act of killing, and 杀, which means simply to kill. When fused, they do not merely add together but intensify and specify one another, creating a single, powerful concept that evokes the image of methodical, brutal, and wholesale slaughter, as of a massacre or carnage, carrying a connotation of inhuman scale and cruelty.