The Chinese word 咖喱 (gālí) for "curry" is a phonetic loanword, formed through a process of transliteration where the two characters were selected purely for their sound to approximate the English word "curry" (which itself derives from the Tamil word "kaṟi"). The characters 咖 (gā) and 喱 (lí) individually carry little to no semantic relation to food or spices in this context; instead, they function as a combined phonetic unit. This is a common method in Chinese for adopting foreign terms, especially for concepts without pre-existing equivalents, resulting in a word whose meaning is entirely derived from its assigned foreign referent rather than the literal meanings of its components.