The word 痰液 is formed by combining the character 痰, meaning phlegm, which itself consists of the radical 疒 indicating illness and the component 炎 providing phonetic and semantic clues related to heat or inflammation, with the character 液, meaning liquid, composed of the water radical 氵 and the phonetic component 夜. Together, they create a compound word that precisely denotes phlegm as a bodily fluid.