The Chinese word "菲律宾" (Fēilǜbīn) for "Philippines" is a phonetic loanword formed through a process called transliteration, where characters are chosen primarily for their sound rather than their meaning to approximate the pronunciation of the foreign name. Specifically, the three characters 菲 (fēi), 律 (lǜ), and 宾 (bīn) combine to mimic the sound of "Philip-pines," with the character 宾 often used in historical transliterations for the "-pine" sound. This follows a standard convention in Chinese for rendering foreign country names, where a phonetic approximation is combined with the suffix "国" (guó, meaning "country") when needed, though it is often omitted in common usage.