The Chinese word 霍华德 is formed through a process of phonetic transliteration, specifically designed to approximate the sounds of a foreign name, in this case, "Howard", using existing Chinese characters that have similar syllable pronunciations. It is constructed by selecting the characters 霍 (huò), 华 (huá), and 德 (dé) not for their meanings, but primarily for how their combined sounds mimic the English pronunciation "Ho-war-d", with the final character often serving to capture a consonant sound like the "d" in a stylized, syllable-based Mandarin sound system.