The word 艾滋病 is formed through a combined process of sound borrowing and meaning suggestion. The first two characters, 艾 (ài) and 滋 (zī), are chosen primarily for their pronunciation to phonetically approximate the sound of the English acronym "AIDS". The third character, 病 (bìng), meaning "disease" or "illness", is then added to the end to clearly categorize and indicate the semantic nature of the term, specifying that it refers to a sickness.