The word 亚历山大 (Yàlìshāndà) is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing, where characters are chosen solely for their sound to approximate the pronunciation of the foreign name "Alexander". Each character, 亚 (yà), 历 (lì), 山 (shān), 大 (dà), represents a syllable, and together they create a close auditory match to the source name, with the individual meanings of the characters ("Asia", "calendar", "mountain", "big") being entirely incidental and irrelevant to its use as a proper name.