The word 激光 is formed by combining two characters to conceptually represent the technology known in English as "laser". The first character, 激 (jī), carries meanings like "to stimulate", "to excite", or "intense", which conceptually captures the process of stimulated emission that is fundamental to how a laser operates. The second character, 光 (guāng), simply means "light". Therefore, the term is not a direct sound translation but rather a semantic construction meaning "stimulated light" or "excited light", effectively describing the core scientific principle of the device, light that is produced by stimulating atoms to emit radiation.