The Chinese word 弥撒 (mísā) is a phonetic loanword formed through transliteration, specifically from the Latin term "Missa," which refers to the Eucharistic liturgy in the Catholic Church. The characters were chosen not for their semantic meaning but primarily for their sound, with 弥 (mí) and 撒 (sā) approximating the syllables of the source word. This is a standard method in Chinese for adopting foreign religious and technical terms, resulting in a word that is phonetically reminiscent of the original while being written with existing Chinese characters.