Word: token Part of Speech: noun Etymology: 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. Pronunciation: /ˈtəʊkən/, /ˈtoʊkən/ 1. Something serving as an expression of something else. Example: According to the Bible, the rainbow is a token of God's covenant with Noah. 2. A keepsake. Example: 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. Example: Subway tokens are being replaced by magnetic cards. Example: A book token is the easiest option for a Christmas gift. 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. Example: 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. Example: His apology was no more than a token. 6. A minor attempt for appearance's sake, or to minimally comply with a requirement; a formality. Example: 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!" Example: Five women were tokens on both counts. Comparing racial tokens to nontokens, tokens reported significantly less favorable interpersonal interactions with their White male colleagues. 7. Evidence, proof; a confirming detail; physical trace, mark, footprint. Labels: figuratively, obsolete, sometimes 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. Example: Say, by this token, I desire his company. Example: And he said, Certainly I will be with thee; and this shall be a token unto thee, that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain. 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. Example: For each lexeme, the scanner creates a small data package known as a token and passes this data package on to the parser. 16. An atomic piece of data, such as a word, for which a meaning may be inferred during parsing. Example: […]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. Example: At some tech companies, including Meta and OpenAI, employees compete on internal leaderboards that show how many tokens — the atomic unit of A.I. use, roughly equivalent to a word fragment — each worker consumes, two people familiar with those companies’ practices said. 17. 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. 18. A meaningless placeholder used as a substitute for sensitive data. 19. A digital asset that is created and managed on an existing blockchain using a smart contract. Example: non-fungible token Example: The NFT rush in 2021 saw sale after sale of the novel digital assets hit staggering sums. A collection of images by the visual artist Beeple sold for $69m, the main token for the “play to earn” video game Axie Infinity hit a total value of $9.75bn and Coca-Cola raised more than $575,000 from selling items such as a customised jacket to be worn in the metaverse. 20. A lexeme; a basic, grammatically indivisible unit of a language such as a keyword, operator or identifier. 21. A single example of a certain word in a text or corpus. Example: 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. 22. A characteristic sign of a disease or of a bodily disorder, a symptom; a sign of a bodily condition, recovery, or health. 23. A livid spot upon the body, indicating, or supposed to indicate, the approach of death. Labels: obsolete Example: Like the fearful tokens of the plague, Are mere fore-runners of their ends. 24. 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. 25. 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. Example: 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 tokens peculliar to the collier who sends up the corf. being hung up, if satisfactory, on the proper “motty-board peg,” if not so, on the “death-board peg;” and it is asserted that “at some collieries as many as 60 or 70 each day, worth to the collier from 6d. to 8. each, are taken from them in this manner.” Example: But worse still was the practice of defrauding them of their earnings, for as their “tokens” were put on to the outside of the tubs it often happened that hundreds were taken off and thrown away; so that they often found, to their exceeding chagrin, when they came to bank, that after having put up with all the abuse and ill-treatment in the mine they had got little or nothing for working all day. 26. A thin bed of coal indicating the existence of a thicker seam at no great distance. 27. A physical object used for exchange between drivers and signalmen on single track lines. Example: 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 in the 21st century than putting in an additional token machine." 28. In a loom, a colored signal to show the weaver which shuttle to use. 29. A piece of metal given beforehand to each person in the congregation who is permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper.