The word "舰长" (jiànzhǎng), meaning "captain" (of a warship), is formed through a standard Chinese compound word structure where the first character "舰" (jiàn) means "warship" or "naval vessel", acting as the noun or domain, and the second character "长" (zhǎng) means "chief", "leader", or "head", serving as the title or role. Combined, they create a head-final compound, literally "ship-chief", that precisely and efficiently denotes the person in command of the vessel, following the common Chinese syntactic pattern where the modifier ("舰") precedes the head noun ("长").