The Chinese word 直升飞机 (zhíshēng fēijī) for "helicopter" is a descriptive compound formed through semantic combination: the character 直 (zhí) means "straight" or "vertical", 升 (shēng) means "to ascend" or "rise", and 飞机 (fēijī) is the general word for "aircraft". Thus, the term literally translates to "vertical-rising aircraft", which directly captures the machine's defining capability of taking off and landing vertically, distinguishing it from fixed-wing airplanes. This logical, meaning-based construction is common in Chinese technical terminology, where the function or key characteristic of an object is often encoded into its name. The term is frequently abbreviated in everyday usage to 直升机 (zhíshēngjī).