The word "众矢之的" is formed by combining the characters 众 (meaning "many" or "crowd"), 矢 (meaning "arrow"), 之 (a grammatical particle functioning as a possessive or modifier linker), and 的 (meaning "target"). In this sequence, 众 modifies 矢 to create "many arrows", which then modifies 的 through 之, resulting in the literal phrase "the target of many arrows", which serves as the basis for its idiomatic sense.