The Chinese word for the Netherlands, 荷兰 (Hélán), is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing and slight semantic tailoring. The characters were chosen primarily because their pronunciation, when combined, approximates the sound of "Holland", the common English name for the country. While the first character 荷 (hé) can mean "lotus" and the second 兰 (lán) can mean "orchid", these meanings are largely incidental; the core function of the characters here is to represent sounds. This method of creating a name is standard in Chinese for transliterating foreign proper nouns, where pleasing or neutral-sounding characters that loosely match the original pronunciation are selected.