The word 病人 is formed by directly combining two meaningful characters: 病 (bìng), which means "illness" or "sickness", and 人 (rén), which means "person". It is a conceptual compound where the first element describes the state or condition of the second, thus creating the straightforward meaning of "sick person" or "patient". This construction follows a classic and intuitive pattern in Chinese where two independent concepts are joined to express a single, new idea.