The compound word 书呆子 (shūdāizi), meaning "bookworm" or "pedant", is formed through a descriptive and somewhat derogatory morphological process: the first morpheme 书 (shū) means "book", the core morpheme 呆 (dāi) means "foolish", "wooden", or "inflexible", and the suffix 子 (zi) is a common nominalizer that creates a concrete noun referring to a person. Thus, the term literally constructs the image of "a person who is foolishly or rigidly obsessed with books", implying a lack of practical wisdom or social adeptness despite scholarly knowledge, and it follows the common Chinese word-formation pattern of Modifier + Characteristic + Nominalizer.