The term **卷宗** is formed through the combination of two meaningful characters: **卷**, which historically refers to a scroll or a rolled-up volume of documents (derived from the practice of storing texts on bamboo or silk scrolls), and **宗**, which means a collection, category, or ancestral archive. Together, they create a compound word that metaphorically signifies "a collected roll of documents," evolving in modern usage to mean a file, dossier, or case archive—essentially an organized collection of papers or records bundled together for a specific purpose, such as legal or administrative proceedings.