The word 茉莉 (mòli), meaning "jasmine", is a disyllabic morpheme formed through phonetic borrowing from a foreign language, specifically from the Sanskrit word "mallikā". The two characters 茉 and 莉 were chosen purely for their sound to approximate the Sanskrit pronunciation, and their individual meanings (莉 itself is a character historically associated with a type of plant, and 茉 has no independent meaning) are largely irrelevant to the word's formation. This is a classic example of a phonetic loanword in Chinese, where the characters act as a syllabic script to transcribe a foreign term, creating a single lexical unit for the flower.