The Chinese word **骡子 (luózi)**, meaning "mule," is a compound formed through a classic Chinese morphological process: it combines the semantic radical **马 (mǎ, horse)**—which categorizes the character as an equine animal—with the phonetic component **累 (lèi)**, which historically provided an approximate sound clue. The character **骡** thus creates a single logogram representing the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey. The suffix **子 (zi)** is then added as a nominalizer, a common feature in Chinese to form concrete nouns, resulting in the everyday term for the animal.