The Chinese word 荷尔蒙 is formed through phonetic transliteration from the English word "hormone", where each character is selected to approximate its sounds: 荷 (hé) for "hor", 尔 (ěr) for "mo", and 蒙 (méng) for "mone", resulting in a term where the characters serve solely to represent pronunciation without conveying meaningful semantics related to the concept.