 Why don’t they? Part of the explanation, of course, may be simply that this route didn’t occur to them. Writing after the Mohists and probably building on their work, Xunzi (or his ghostwriter) seems to have improved on their semantic theory in this  respect.[37]  Unlike the Mohists, who as we saw distinguish only  three sorts  of names—reaching, kind, and personal—Xunzi distinguishes many possible levels of general terms (gòng míng 共名), specifically explaining that, among general terms, a “compound” name (such as ‘moral killing’) and a “single” name (such as ‘killing’) can both refer to the same thing, the single name being more general. Xunzi’s approach might help to resolve some of the Mohists’ concerns about name compounding.