The Chinese word 坚果 (jiānguǒ), meaning "nut" (as in edible nuts like almonds or walnuts), is a compound word formed by combining two characters: 坚 (jiān), which means "hard" or "solid", and 果 (guǒ), which means "fruit". It is a descriptive, semantic compound where the first character 坚 modifies the second 果 to specify the type of fruit, literally a "hard fruit". This construction follows a common pattern in Chinese where an adjective-noun pairing creates a new, logical term for a category of objects, effectively defining nuts by their most distinctive physical characteristic: their hard shell.