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token

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token

  • /ˈtəʊkən/ UK
  • /ˈtoʊkən/ US

Rhymes with -əʊkən

Where it comes from

From Middle English token, taken, from Old English tācn (“sign, symbol”), from Proto-West Germanic *taikn, from Proto-Germanic *taikną (“indicator, symbol, sign”), from Proto-Indo-European *deyḱ- (“to show, instruct, teach”) with Germanic *k rather than *h by Kluge's law.

Cognate with Scots takin, taiken (“token, sign”), Saterland Frisian Teken (“sign, symbol”), West Frisian teken (“sign, mark, symbol”), Dutch teken (“sign, indication, symbol”), German Low German Teken (“sign, symbol”), German Zeichen (“sign, token”), Danish tegn (“sign, token, character”), Swedish tecken (“sign, indication”), Faroese tekn, tekin (“mark, sign, signal”), Icelandic teikn (“sign, omen”), Icelandic tákn (“symbol”).

The verb is from Middle English toknen, from Old English tācnian.

noun tokens

  1. Something serving as an expression of something else. According to the Bible, the rainbow is a token of God's covenant with Noah.
  2. A keepsake. Please accept this bustier as a token of our time together.
  3. A piece of stamped metal or plastic, etc., used as a form of currency; a voucher that can be exchanged for goods or services. Subway tokens are being replaced by magnetic cards.
  4. A small physical object, often designed to give the appearance of a common thing, used to represent a person or character in a board game or other situation. Everyone pick a token (hat, wheelbarrow, thimble, etc.) and place it on the Start square.
  5. A minor attempt for appearance's sake, or to minimally comply with a requirement; a formality. His apology was no more than a token.
  6. A member of a group of people that is included within a larger group to comply with a legal or social requirement. New York Philharmonic has a token of one Negro. The Pittsburgh Symphony ranks high with three tokens. Cleveland has one, and other major symphony orchestras such as Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago still say, "Get back!"
  7. figuratively, obsolete, sometimes Evidence, proof; a confirming detail; physical trace, mark, footprint.
  8. Support for a belief; grounds for an opinion.
  9. An extraordinary event serving as evidence of supernatural power.
  10. An object or disclosure to attest or authenticate the bearer or an instruction.
  11. A seal guaranteeing the quality of an item.
  12. Something given or shown as a symbol or guarantee of authority or right; a sign of authenticity, of power, good faith. Say, by this token, I desire his company.
  13. A tally.
  14. A particular thing to which a concept applies.
  15. An atomic piece of data, such as a word, for which a meaning may be inferred during parsing. For each lexeme, the scanner creates a small data package known as a token and passes this data package on to the parser.
  16. A discrete unit identified and processed during computational analysis of data, especially an individual unit output by a tokenizer.
  17. The basic unit of data processed by generative AI models during training and inference, often used as a consumption metric. […]One judge cited expert testimony that showed that Llama could reproduce no more than 50 tokens from the plaintiffs’ books, though research has since been published that proves otherwise.
  18. A conceptual object that can be possessed by a computer, process, etc. in order to regulate a turn-taking system such as a token ring network.
  19. A meaningless placeholder used as a substitute for sensitive data.
  20. A digital asset that is created and managed on an existing blockchain using a smart contract. non-fungible token
  21. A lexeme; a basic, grammatically indivisible unit of a language such as a keyword, operator or identifier.
  22. A single example of a certain word or other linguistic item in a text or corpus. However, note the token ontology, ranked the 15ᵗʰ most frequent token in our ontology corpus, occurs 1940 times out of 336,311 tokens, but ontology only occurs 52 times in the BNC – the ratio of two relative frequencies is 10895.
  23. A characteristic sign of a disease or of a bodily disorder, a symptom; a sign of a bodily condition, recovery, or health.
  24. obsolete A livid spot upon the body, indicating, or supposed to indicate, the approach of death. Like the fearful tokens of the plague, Are mere fore-runners of their ends.
  25. Ten and a half quires, or, commonly, 250 sheets, of paper printed on both sides; also, in some cases, the same number of sheets printed on one side, or half the number printed on both sides.
  26. A bit of leather having a peculiar mark designating a particular miner. Each hewer sent one of these with each corf or tub he had hewn. But the coal-owner refuses to pay for a corf or tub simply on the ground that it contains too little weight, or that it contains “softs” instead of all “hards,”—a refusal technically known by its symbol as “hanging the motties," or by a bolder metaphor as “hanging the hutches,”—the “motties,” or tok
  27. A thin bed of coal indicating the existence of a thicker seam at no great distance.
  28. A physical object used for exchange between drivers and signalmen on single track lines. Although splitting a single-line section into two might seem a simple solution, Williams adds that creating another location where drivers have to get out of the cab and walk to a cabinet to exchange tokens before a train can proceed will further slow down the service: "There must be a better option
  29. In a loom, a colored signal to show the weaver which shuttle to use.
  30. A piece of metal given beforehand to each person in the congregation who is permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper.

adjective more token · most token

  1. Done as an indication or a pledge.
  2. Perfunctory or merely symbolic; done or existing for appearance's sake, or to minimally comply with a requirement. a token gesture
  3. Included in minimal numbers in order to create an impression or illusion of diversity, especially ethnic or gender diversity. He was hired as the company's token black person.

verb tokens · tokening · tokened

  1. To betoken, indicate, portend, designate, denote dorrẹ̅, dōrī adj. & n. […] Golden or reddish-yellow […] (a. 1398) *Trev. Barth. 59b/a: ʒelouʒ colour [of urine] […] tokeneþ febleness of hete […] dorrey & citrine & liʒt red tokeneþ mene.
  2. To betroth
  3. To symbolize, instantiate In which sense does ‘∀p ~(p & ~p)’ cause the tokening of the belief in the subject?

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