The word 嫁女 is formed by combining the character 嫁, which means "to marry off" and is itself composed of the semantic radical 女 (woman) and the phonetic component 家 (jiā), with the character 女 meaning "daughter" or "woman". This creates a verb-object structure where 嫁 functions as the verb indicating the action of giving in marriage, and 女 serves as the object receiving that action, resulting in the literal meaning "to marry off a daughter".