The word 香槟酒 (xiāngbīnjiǔ) is a Chinese loanword for "champagne" formed through a combination of phonetic borrowing and semantic categorization. The first two characters, 香槟 (xiāngbīn), phonetically approximate the French word "Champagne," with 香 (xiāng, meaning "fragrant") loosely hinting at aroma and 槟 (bīn) serving as a sound carrier. The final character 酒 (jiǔ, meaning "alcoholic drink") is added as a semantic classifier to explicitly denote the category of the word as a type of beverage, a common practice in Chinese for translating foreign drink names.