The Chinese word for pyramid, 金字塔 (jīnzìtǎ), is a semantically constructed compound that vividly captures the essence of the structure through its components: 金 (jīn) means "gold", 字 (zì) means "character" or "word", and 塔 (tǎ) means "tower". It is thus a "gold-character-tower", a name derived from the pyramid's geometric shape, which resembles the Chinese character for "gold" (金), a triangle atop a trapezoid, and its function as a monumental tomb, likened to a towering structure, with the association to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ("characters") also implicitly embedded in the term.