The term 当兵 (dāngbīng), meaning "to serve as a soldier" or "to enlist in the army", is a verb-object compound formed through the combination of the verb 当 (dāng), meaning "to serve as" or "to work as", and the noun 兵 (bīng), meaning "soldier" or "military personnel". Literally, it translates as "to serve as a soldier", where 当 acts upon the object 兵, creating a fixed, idiomatic phrase that conceptually encapsulates the action and its specific professional role within a single lexical unit.