The word 水泥 (shuǐní, meaning "cement") is formed by directly combining two tangible, everyday concepts into a new, singular idea. It takes 水 (shuǐ, "water"), the essential liquid agent, and 泥 (ní, "mud" or "clay"), the soft, malleable earth, to visually and functionally describe the material: a dry powder that becomes a hardened, stone-like substance when mixed with water, essentially creating "artificial stone" from the combination of these two basic elements.