The word "莎士比亚" is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing, specifically as a direct transliteration of the English name "Shakespeare" into Chinese characters. The characters 莎 (shā), 士 (shì), 比 (bǐ), and 亚 (yà) were selected not for their individual meanings, but because their combined pronunciation closely approximates the sounds of the original English name when spoken in Mandarin. This is a conventional method for importing foreign names into Chinese, where the primary function of the characters is to represent sound rather than to convey semantic meaning.