The Chinese word 坠机 (zhuìjī), meaning "airplane crash", is a compound formed through straightforward semantic combination: the first character 坠 (zhuì) means "to fall" or "to crash down", and the second character 机 (jī) is a common abbreviation for 飞机 (fēijī), meaning "airplane". When combined, the term literally and logically conveys the concept of "falling/crashing airplane", following the common Chinese syntactic pattern where a descriptive verb (坠) modifies a noun (机) to create a specific, fixed term for a catastrophic aviation event.