The Chinese word 跑车 is a compound noun formed by combining two characters: 跑 (pǎo), meaning "to run" or "to dash", and 车 (chē), meaning "vehicle" or "car". It is a semantic compound where the first character describes the function or characteristic of the object denoted by the second. Literally, it translates to "running car", but through common usage, it has acquired the specialized meaning of a sports car or a high-performance automobile, emphasizing its speed and racing capability, thus moving from a literal description to a fixed lexical term for a specific vehicle category.