The term "华氏" (Huáshì), meaning "Fahrenheit", is formed through a combination of semantic and phonetic borrowing: the character 华 is used primarily for its sound to transcribe the first syllable of "Fahrenheit", while the character 氏 (meaning "clan" or "family name") acts as a semantic suffix commonly used in Chinese to denote systems or scales named after people (similar to its use in "摄氏" for Celsius). Thus, the compound literally means "the Hua scale", with "Hua" standing for the inventor, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit.