The closest thing they'd be in English would be a Latin root. Some Chinese words are a single character, but most are multi-character, and like Latin roots,

The closest thing they'd be in English would be a Latin root. Some Chinese words are a single character, but most are multi-character, and like Latin roots, characters have a "meaning" associated with the set of words in which they appear. For example, the character anciently used for lightning now appears in many words associated with electricity, such as phones, TVs, electric subway trains, computers, and so on, as well as seemingly unrelated words (like "movie") which actually have a historical etymological relationship to electricity (the projectors).