The word "沈河" is formed by combining two characters: "沈" is a phono-semantic character composed of the water radical "氵" for meaning and the phonetic component "冘", while "河" is similarly a phono-semantic character with the water radical "氵" and the phonetic "可", meaning river; together, they constitute a compound word typically used as a placename, where "沈" often references a specific location like Shenyang and "河" indicates a river, thus denoting a river-related area.