The word **的士** (díshì), meaning "taxi," is a direct phonetic loanword from English, formed through a common Chinese process for adopting foreign terms. The characters were chosen not for their meanings (的 can mean "target" or possessive "of," and 士 means "scholar" or "warrior") but almost exclusively for how closely their combined pronunciation approximates the sound of the English word "taxi." This results in a disyllabic word where each character represents a syllable, creating a recognizable auditory match while fitting into the standard morphological structure of modern Chinese.