The Chinese word 海绵 (hǎimián), meaning "sponge", is a compound word formed through semantic combination, where the first character 海 (hǎi) means "sea" and the second character 绵 (mián) means "cotton" or "fluff". Together, they create a logical and descriptive term: "sea cotton", which historically and conceptually refers to the natural sea sponge, a soft, absorbent organism found in the ocean that resembles cotton in texture. This formation exemplifies a common Chinese word-creation method where two meaningful characters are combined to produce a new, transparent concept based on the attributes or origin of the object.