The Chinese word 水母 (shuǐmǔ), meaning "jellyfish," is a compound noun formed through semantic combination, where 水 (shuǐ) means "water" and 母 (mǔ) means "mother." It follows a common structural pattern in Chinese where 母 is used metaphorically to denote an origin, source, or nurturing entity within a specific domain. Thus, 水母 literally translates to "water mother," a poetic and descriptive term that conceptually frames the jellyfish as a nurturing or generative entity of the sea, reflecting its soft, floating, and often central presence in aquatic environments, similar to how 云母 (yúnmǔ, "mica") is the "mother of clouds" or 字母 (zìmǔ, "alphabet") is the "mother of characters."