The Chinese word 休斯顿 (Xiūsīdùn) is a phonetic transliteration of the English city name "Houston," formed through a process called *transcription* or *sound borrowing*. It does not carry the literal meanings of its individual characters (休 "rest," 斯 "this," 顿 "pause"); instead, each character is selected purely for its modern Mandarin pronunciation to approximate the original English sounds: "Xiu" for "Hou," "si" for "s," and "dun" for "ton." This is a standard method in Chinese for representing foreign proper nouns, creating a new word solely based on phonetic resemblance.