The Chinese word **沉船** is a compound formed by combining two distinct characters: **沉** (chén), meaning "to sink" or "to submerge," and **船** (chuán), meaning "ship" or "boat." It follows a common grammatical structure in Chinese where a verb (**沉**) is placed before its object (**船**) to create a noun meaning "sunken ship" or, more literally, the act or result of "a ship sinking." This verb-object relationship makes the compound semantically transparent, as the meaning is directly derived from the combination of its parts—a ship that has sunk.