The Chinese word **斐济** (Fěijì) for the island nation of "Fiji" is a phonetic transliteration, formed by selecting two characters whose modern Mandarin pronunciations closely approximate the sounds of the English name "Fiji" (Fee-jee). The first character **斐** (fěi) captures the "Fi" sound, while the second character **济** (jì) matches the "ji" sound. This is a standard method for borrowing foreign proper nouns into Chinese, where the original meaning of the characters (斐 can mean "elegant" and 济 can mean "to aid") is typically disregarded in favor of their sound, resulting in a neutral, phonetically-derived name.