The Chinese word 毒性 (dúxìng), meaning "toxicity" or "poisonous nature", is a compound noun formed through a common morphological process in Mandarin. It combines the morpheme 毒 (dú), which means "poison" or "toxic", with the highly productive nominalizing suffix 性 (xìng), which means "nature", "property", or "characteristic". Therefore, the construction follows a straightforward "modifier + head" structure where 毒 specifies the type of property, and 性 categorizes it as an inherent quality, resulting in the meaning "the property of being poisonous". This pattern is analogous to English suffixes like "-ness" or "-ity" (as in "poisonous" -> "toxicity").