The word 民主 is formed through the conceptual fusion of its two constituent characters: 民 (mín), meaning "the people" or "the populace", and 主 (zhǔ), meaning "to master" or "to be in charge". When combined, they create a new, compound idea where 民 becomes the subject exercising the action or state of 主, conceptually synthesizing into the meaning of "the people being the master" or "the people as the sovereign", which is the classical Chinese equivalent and modern term for "democracy". Its formation is not grammatical but ideographic, building a holistic political concept from two fundamental notions.