The Chinese word 莫斯科 (Mòsīkē) for "Moscow" is formed through phonetic transliteration, where each character is selected solely for its sound to approximate the pronunciation of the original foreign name. The characters 莫 (mò), 斯 (sī), and 科 (kē) sequentially mimic the syllables "Mo", "s", and "ko" from the English "Moscow" or the Russian "Москва" (Moskva), creating a cohesive auditory match without regard to the individual meanings of the characters, which are irrelevant in this context. This process is a standard convention in Chinese for adapting non-native place names into the writing system.