The word 金庸 is formed by combining the character 金, meaning "gold" or "metal", with the character 庸, meaning "mediocre" or "ordinary". These two characters are juxtaposed as monosyllabic morphemes to create a disyllabic compound, which functions as a proper name, specifically, the pen name of the author Louis Cha. The formation relies on the direct assembly of individual meaning-bearing units into a single lexical item.