The Chinese word "澳大利亚" (Àodàlìyà) is formed primarily through phonetic transliteration, where each character is chosen to approximate the sounds of the foreign name "Australia". The characters 澳 (ào), 大 (dà), 利 (lì), and 亚 (yà) sequentially replicate the syllables of the English name, with no inherent meaning related to the country itself in this context. Historically, it is a standardized phonetic borrowing, though the first character, 澳, often used for "bay" or "port", was likely selected because early Chinese contact with Western nations frequently occurred in coastal harbors, adding a faint, conventionalized geographic connotation to an otherwise sound-based construction.