token
Part of speech: noun
adj
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: Christianity
Protestantism
business
computing
cryptocurrencies
cryptocurrency
engineering
finance
grammar
human-sciences
linguistics
manufacturing
mathematics
media
medicine
mining
natural-sciences
philosophy
physical-sciences
printing
publishing
rail-transport
railways
sciences
textiles
transport
weaving
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.
Inflected forms:
form: tokens
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: more token
pos: adj
tags: comparative
form: most token
pos: adj
tags: superlative
form: tokens
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: tokening
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: tokened
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: tokened
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: Something serving as an expression of something else.
pos: noun
examples: According to the Bible, the rainbow is a token of God's covenant with Noah.
gloss: A keepsake.
pos: noun
examples: Please accept this bustier as a token of our time together.
gloss: A piece of stamped metal or plastic, etc., used as a form of currency; a voucher that can be exchanged for goods or services.
pos: noun
examples: Subway tokens are being replaced by magnetic cards.
A book token is the easiest option for a Christmas gift.
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
examples: Everyone pick a token (hat, wheelbarrow, thimble, etc.) and place it on the Start square.
gloss: A minor attempt for appearance's sake, or to minimally comply with a requirement; a formality.
pos: noun
examples: His apology was no more than a token.
gloss: A minor attempt for appearance's sake, or to minimally comply with a requirement; a formality.
pos: noun
examples: 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!"
Five women were tokens on both counts. Comparing racial tokens to nontokens, tokens reported significantly less favorable interpersonal interactions with their White male colleagues.
They were tokens, however: the majority of oppressed people will not experience these benefits. Tokens were used to pacify the masses and provide the mirage that racism was no longer a factor
Women and racial minorities (e.g., blacks, Hispanics, Asians) often are tokens in organizations or in organizational groups (e.g., departments, boards of directors, management).
gloss: Evidence, proof; a confirming detail; physical trace, mark, footprint.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
obsolete
sometimes
gloss: Support for a belief; grounds for an opinion.
pos: noun
gloss: An extraordinary event serving as evidence of supernatural power.
pos: noun
gloss: An object or disclosure to attest or authenticate the bearer or an instruction.
pos: noun
gloss: A seal guaranteeing the quality of an item.
pos: noun
gloss: Something given or shown as a symbol or guarantee of authority or right; a sign of authenticity, of power, good faith.
pos: noun
examples: Say, by this token, I desire his company.
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.
gloss: A tally.
pos: noun
gloss: A particular thing to which a concept applies.
pos: noun
gloss: An atomic piece of data, such as a word, for which a meaning may be inferred during parsing.
pos: noun
examples: For each lexeme, the scanner creates a small data package known as a token and passes this data package on to the parser.
gloss: An atomic piece of data, such as a word, for which a meaning may be inferred during parsing.
pos: noun
examples: […]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.
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.
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
gloss: A meaningless placeholder used as a substitute for sensitive data.
pos: noun
gloss: A digital asset that is created and managed on an existing blockchain using a smart contract.
pos: noun
examples: non-fungible token
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.
In May 2025, the president hosted the 220 largest buyers of $Trump and held a private “reception” for the largest 25 buyers, who spent around $148m on $Trump tokens.
gloss: A lexeme; a basic, grammatically indivisible unit of a language such as a keyword, operator or identifier.
pos: noun
gloss: A single example of a certain word in a text or corpus.
pos: noun
examples: 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.
gloss: A characteristic sign of a disease or of a bodily disorder, a symptom; a sign of a bodily condition, recovery, or health.
pos: noun
gloss: A livid spot upon the body, indicating, or supposed to indicate, the approach of death.
pos: noun
tags: obsolete
examples: Like the fearful tokens of the plague, Are mere fore-runners of their ends.
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
gloss: 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.
pos: noun
examples: 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.”
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.
The “token” is simply a small piece of leather with a given number upon it, and as the colliers work in pairs--not at the same time, but in succession, the one man taking the “fore shift,” the other the “back shift,”—each pair has a specific number, and round the “token” cabin are ranged hooks also numbered to correspond with the tokens the colliers take down with them into the mine; every tub laden with coal that comes to bank has in it one of these “tokens,” and the business of token-keeper is to secure these and lodge them upon their corresponding hooks, so that at the end of each shift, or day of labour, the colliers knows how many tubs he has sent “to bank”.
gloss: A thin bed of coal indicating the existence of a thicker seam at no great distance.
pos: noun
gloss: A physical object used for exchange between drivers and signalmen on single track lines.
pos: noun
examples: 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."
gloss: In a loom, a colored signal to show the weaver which shuttle to use.
pos: noun
gloss: A piece of metal given beforehand to each person in the congregation who is permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper.
pos: noun
gloss: Done as an indication or a pledge.
pos: adj
gloss: Perfunctory or merely symbolic; done or existing for appearance's sake, or to minimally comply with a requirement.
pos: adj
examples: a token gesture
He made a token tap on the brake pedal at the stop sign.
If the as had been reduced to a token in 240 BC, it was now a little more token than before.
It sounds very token, another damp squib which will probably end up benefiting more bureaucrats than artists or scientists.
There are still many churches where the participation of women is token.
gloss: Included in minimal numbers in order to create an impression or illusion of diversity, especially ethnic or gender diversity.
pos: adj
examples: He was hired as the company's token black person.
The television show was primarily directed toward a black audience, but it did have a few token white people as performers.
However, it should be noted that wherever ministers are opposed to mixed churches, the racial admixture is token.
It disputed the NAACP's argument that its minority employment was token, noting that it employed minorities in six years of its seven-year term and hired Blacks as station manager and news director among its five minority hires for full-time positions.
Even appointees who knew their positions were token would coolly take from the situation whatever benefits they could get.
Having been in a university environment that was incredibly hostile to women, coming here seems like heaven. There are a lot of women senior faculty. In the university, there was only one in the department, and she was very token.
In the rehabilitation (or any other) work-settings, minority counselors in double token status (e.g., female, black ) or triple token status ( female, black, with a disability) may experience more intense token effects of have mixed outcomes.
This perspective thus implies a corollary that addresses the most highly imbalanced gender compositions and that we label as token. […] Therefore, "token" women's participation and authority will be lower than "token" men's.
gloss: To betoken, indicate, portend, designate, denote
pos: verb
examples: 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.
The instinct revolted against the inevitable punishment to come, already tokened by those big holes now met in walls and crossings.
Kant's theory of productive imagination, Schiller's aesthetics of Schein, and Hegel's loosening of the determinacy of concepts by means of the process-oriented dialectical model of rationality token a domain of experience in which single objects have significance that is at the same time superabundant and noncategorical.
gloss: To betroth
pos: verb
gloss: To symbolize, instantiate
pos: verb
examples: In which sense does ‘∀p ~(p & ~p)’ cause the tokening of the belief in the subject?
Related words: particular
universal
type
Derived words: abbey token
access token
book token
bride token
by that token
by the same token
Conder token
CSRF token
fungible token
gift token
God's token
hard-times token
honeytoken
in token of
love token
milk token
more betoken
more by token
non-fungible token
non-tangible token
nontoken
subtoken
super-token
that and a token will get you on the subway
token bucket
token economy
token grabbing
tokenisation
tokenish
tokenism
tokenist
tokenistic
tokenization
tokenize
tokenless
tokenlike
token money
tokenomics
token-pasting operator
token ring
token strike
tokenwise
type-token distinction
type-token ratio
USB token
voken
foretoken
betoken
Translations:
lang: Chinese Mandarin
word: 詞元 /词元
lang: Dutch
word: token
lang: Dutch
word: symbool
lang: Esperanto
word: simbolo
lang: Esperanto
word: signo
lang: Finnish
word: alkionimi
lang: Finnish
word: symboli
lang: Finnish
word: sanake
lang: Icelandic
word: tóki
lang: Spanish
word: símbolo