The Chinese word 拉斯维加斯 is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing, where individual Chinese characters are selected not for their meanings but specifically for how closely their pronunciations mimic the sounds of the English name "Las Vegas". Each character, 拉 (lā), 斯 (sī), 维 (wéi), 加 (jiā), 斯 (sī), acts as a phonetic syllable to replicate the foreign sound sequence as heard by Chinese speakers, resulting in a new compound that functions solely as a proper name for the city, with no semantic relationship to the original meanings of the constituent characters.