The word "绿卡" (lǜ kǎ), meaning "green card," is a compound noun formed through semantic combination, where "绿" (lǜ) means "green" and "卡" (kǎ) is a phonetic loan character for "card." It is a direct, colloquial translation of the American "green card" (the United States Permanent Resident Card), which historically and famously has a green color. The term exemplifies how modern Chinese often creates new vocabulary by descriptively combining a color or characteristic with a functional object, resulting in a culturally borrowed yet linguistically transparent compound.