The word 葡萄 is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing, where two existing characters were selected purely for their sound to transcribe the name of a fruit introduced from Central Asia along the Silk Road. The characters 葡 (pú) and 萄 (táo) individually carry no specific meaning related to grapes; they were combined because their combined pronunciation approximated the sound of the source word, likely from an Iranian language like Bactrian or Persian. This created a disyllabic word that, as a fixed unit, came to refer exclusively to the grape vine and its fruit.