The Chinese word 蚊子 (wénzi) for "mosquito" is a disyllabic compound formed through a classic morphological process where the core meaning-carrying character 蚊 (wén) is combined with the suffix 子 (zi). The character 蚊 itself is a phono-semantic compound, composed of the 虫 (chóng) radical on the left, meaning "insect" or "creepy-crawly", which provides the semantic category, and the component 文 (wén) on the right, which primarily offers a phonetic clue to its pronunciation. The addition of the suffix 子, which often nominalizes or denotes a small entity, creates a standalone, colloquial noun, resulting in the complete word 蚊子 that specifically means "mosquito".