The word 鱿鱼 (yóuyú), meaning "squid", is a compound noun formed through a common Chinese morphological process where the semantic component 鱼 (yú), meaning "fish", is added to the more specific character 鱿 (yóu). The character 鱿 itself is a phono-semantic compound: its left side, 鱼, acts as the semantic radical, categorizing it as a sea creature, while its right side, 尤 (yóu), primarily provides a phonetic clue to its pronunciation. Thus, the term is built by combining a phonetic base (尤) with a categorical radical (鱼) to create 鱿, which is then paired with the general noun 鱼 to explicitly denote it as a type of aquatic animal, resulting in the precise meaning of "squid".