The word "阿富汗" is formed through phonetic transliteration, where each character is chosen primarily for how closely its pronunciation in Chinese approximates the sounds of the foreign name "Afghan". The characters 阿 (ā), 富 (fù), and 罕 (hǎn) are combined in sequence to mimic the syllables of "Afghan", creating a written representation in Chinese that sounds similar to the original English name, with their individual meanings being largely irrelevant to this purpose.