The word 消费 is formed by combining two conceptual characters: 消, which carries the notion of "dissipating" or "vanishing", and 费, which means "to spend" or "to expend". Together, they conceptually merge to express the idea of spending (money, resources, time) in a way that causes it to diminish or be used up, perfectly capturing the core action and consequence of consumption. It’s a direct semantic synthesis where one character provides the action of expenditure and the other provides the resulting state of depletion.