The Chinese word "亚利桑那" (Yàlìsāngnà) is a phonetic transcription formed through a process of transliteration, where characters are selected primarily for their sound rather than their meaning to approximate the pronunciation of the English place name "Arizona." Each character represents a syllable: "亚" (yà) for "A," "利" (lì) for "ri," "桑" (sāng) for "zo," and "那" (nà) for "na." The characters were chosen from the standard Chinese lexicon for their close acoustic match to the original name's syllables, following the common Chinese convention for rendering foreign proper nouns, resulting in a term that is recognizable to Chinese speakers while bearing no semantic relation to the geographical entity itself.