The word 总之 is formed through a classical Chinese grammatical construction where the character 总, meaning "to gather up" or "general", is combined with the classical possessive and object marker 之, meaning "of it" or "them". This creates a literal, fused meaning of "in gathering (all of) that" or "to summarize it". It is a lexicalized fusion where the two characters operate as a single, inseparable unit expressing the abstract concept of drawing a general conclusion from preceding details.