It can say anything we want it to say. Because of the history of the term symbol in computing, however, people tend to attach more meaning to the word than is appropriate here. Usually, people think of a symbol as a string that is translated into a number by some means, usually a compiler. Therefore most people think of a symbol as being equal to some number. This brings us to the second property of symbols.
Symbols are distinct.
If we have two strings that we want to use symbolically, we have to ensure that they are distinct. If two such strings happen to look the same, which is to say they have the same characters, and those characters in the same order, then they are logically the same string, and we must make them be physically the same string as well . This is not as hard as it might sound. In fact, the Java String class is already prepared to do this for us. The readability benefit is obvious.