The Chinese term "希伯来" (Xībólái) for "Hebrew" is a phonetic transliteration formed through a historical process of adapting foreign sounds into Chinese characters. Each character was chosen primarily for its pronunciation to approximate the syllables of the source word ("Hebrew" or its equivalents in other mediating languages like Greek or Latin), with "希" (xī) for "He-", "伯" (bó) for "-brew", and "来" (lái) often serving as a common suffix in transliterations to capture the "-ic" or "-an" sound or to complete the phonetic flow, resulting in a term that carries no inherent semantic meaning related to the Hebrew people or language but functions purely as a sound-based label.