The word 大众 is formed through the direct and logical combination of its two component characters: 大 (dà), meaning "big" or "great", and 众 (zhòng), meaning "crowd" or "many people". It is a conceptual compound where the meaning of the whole is essentially the sum of its parts, a "big crowd". This literal notion of a large multitude of people naturally extends to its modern meanings of "the masses", "the general public", or "the populace", forming the word through a clear, ideographic merger of scale and collectivity.