The Chinese word **核桃** (hé táo), meaning "walnut," is a compound word formed through semantic combination, where **核** (hé) means "pit," "stone," or "core," and **桃** (táo) means "peach." It is a descriptive or metaphorical construction, literally translating to "pit-peach" or "stone-fruit like a peach," which historically referred to the fact that the edible part is enclosed in a hard, stone-like shell similar to how a peach's seed is inside a fleshy fruit, though in this case the entire structure is the hard-shelled nut itself. This reflects a common pattern in Chinese where compound nouns are created by combining a core characteristic (the hard pit) with a familiar object (a peach) for naming.