The word 残疾人 (cánjí rén), meaning "disabled person" or "person with a disability", is formed through a logical compounding of three distinct characters: 残 (cán), which conveys "damaged", "injured", or "incomplete"; 疾 (jí), which means "illness" or "sickness"; and 人 (rén), meaning "person". The combination 残疾 functions as an adjective or noun meaning "disability", literally "injury-illness", which then modifies 人 ("person") to specify an individual who has a physical or mental impairment. This structure follows the common Chinese syntactic pattern where a descriptive compound (残疾) is placed before a core noun (人) to create a precise term for a category of people.