The Chinese word "爱因斯坦" (Àiyīnsītǎn) is a direct phonetic transliteration of the surname "Einstein", formed through the common Chinese practice of borrowing sounds from foreign languages by selecting pre-existing Chinese characters that approximate the original pronunciation, with the characters' individual meanings (such as 爱 [ài, love], 因 [yīn, cause], 斯 [sī, this], and 坦 [tǎn, level]) being largely irrelevant and chosen solely for their sound in Mandarin. This method of creating new words, known as transliterated loanwords, is standard for translating foreign personal and place names into Chinese, resulting in a term that is phonetically recognizable but semantically non-descriptive of the person it denotes.