The Chinese word "德国" for Germany is formed by combining the character "德", which phonetically approximates the "Deu" in "Deutsch" (the German endonym), with the character "国", meaning "country" or "nation". This structure follows a conventional approach in Chinese for naming foreign countries, where a sound-based character represents the native pronunciation and "国" signifies it as a sovereign state, resulting in a term that essentially means "Deutsch-country".