The word 玛利亚 is formed through phonetic borrowing, where existing Chinese characters are selected purely for their sound to approximate the pronunciation of the foreign name "Maria". The characters 玛 (mǎ), 利 (lì), and 亚 (yà) are strung together not for their individual meanings (which are "agate", "benefit", and "inferior/second" respectively), but because their combined syllables create a close auditory match to the source name, following the common Chinese convention for transcribing foreign names and terms.