The word 玻璃 (bōli), meaning "glass", is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing from a foreign language. It is a disyllabic loanword that originated as a transliteration of the Sanskrit word sphatika (meaning "crystal" or "quartz"), which entered Chinese via Buddhist texts. Both characters, 玻 and 璃, were selected purely for their sound, bō and lí, to approximate the foreign pronunciation, with their individual meanings (like "jade" for 璃) being largely irrelevant. This creation exemplifies a common method in Chinese for forming words to represent imported concepts or materials by combining characters that mimic the original word's syllables.