The Chinese word for Spain, "西班牙" (Xībānyá), is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing, where characters are selected primarily for how closely their pronunciation approximates the sounds of the foreign name, in this case, "España". The three characters "西" (xī), "班" (bān), and "牙" (yá) are combined not for their individual meanings (which are "west", "class/team", and "tooth", respectively), but to collectively mimic the sound of the source word, creating a purely phonetic representation of "Spain" in Chinese.