The word 伏羲 is formed by combining two characters: 伏, which historically derives from a pictographic representation of a person with a dog, conveying ideas like submission or hiding, and 羲, a character composed of semantic elements such as 羊 (sheep) and 我 (self) along with phonetic components, often associated with concepts like brightness or vapor. In this compound, these characters are fused into a fixed lexical unit solely to denote the mythological emperor Fu Xi, with the individual meanings not directly contributing to the reference.