The word 植物 (zhíwù), meaning "plant", is formed by combining two independent Chinese characters, each contributing a core meaning. The first character, 植 (zhí), carries the fundamental sense of "to plant", "to set up", or "to grow". The second, 物 (wù), broadly means "thing" or "entity". When fused, the concept logically becomes "a thing that is planted/grown" or "a growing entity", which directly and efficiently denotes the category of living organisms we call plants. This formation is a classic example of semantic compounding in Chinese, where two meaningful units merge to create a new, composite idea.