Word.ws English Dictionary

token

UK/ˈtəʊkən//ˈtoʊkən/

token noun: something serving as an expression of something else.

Noun

token (plural 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.
    Synonyms:
    sign, symbol, pledge
  2. A keepsake.
    • Please accept this bustier as a token of our time together.
    Synonyms:
    memento, souvenir
  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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    1. 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!"1968, Ave Maria, volume 108, page 17
      • Five women were tokens on both counts. Comparing racial tokens to nontokens, tokens reported significantly less favorable interpersonal interactions with their White male colleagues.2005, Morris Fromkin, edited by Peter G. Watson-Boone, The Quest for Social Justice III, page 61
  6. (figuratively, obsolete, sometimes) Evidence, proof; a confirming detail; physical trace, mark, footprint.
  7. Support for a belief; grounds for an opinion.
    Synonyms:
    reason, reasoning
  8. An extraordinary event serving as evidence of supernatural power.
    Synonyms:
    miracle
  9. An object or disclosure to attest or authenticate the bearer or an instruction.
    Synonyms:
    password
  10. A seal guaranteeing the quality of an item.
  11. 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.c. 1603–1604 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Measure for Measure”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
    • 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.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Exodus 3:12
  12. A tally.
Show 15 more meaningsShow fewer meanings
  1. A particular thing to which a concept applies.
  2. 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.2004, Randall Hyde, Write Great Code: Understanding the Machine, page 68
    Synonyms:
    symbol
    1. A discrete unit identified and processed during computational analysis of data, especially an individual unit output by a tokenizer.
    2. (artificial intelligence) 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.2026 January 9, Alex Reisner, “AI’s Memorization Crisis”, in Jeffrey Goldberg, editor, The Atlantic, Washington, D.C.: The Atlantic Monthly Group, →ISSN, →OCLC
      • 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.2026 March 20, Kevin Roose, “More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  3. 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.
  4. A meaningless placeholder used as a substitute for sensitive data.
  5. A digital asset that is created and managed on an existing blockchain using a smart contract.
    • 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...2022 May 6, Alex Hern, Dan Milmo, “NFTs: the great rush may be over – but are they in actual decline?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
  6. A lexeme; a basic, grammatically indivisible unit of a language such as a keyword, operator or identifier.
  7. (corpus linguistics) 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 10895.2007, Khurshid Ahmad, “Artificial Ontologies and Real Thoughts: Populating the Semantic Web?”, in Roberto Basili, Maria Teresa Pazienza, editors, AI*IA 2007: Artificial Intelligence and...
    Antonyms:
    type
  8. A characteristic sign of a disease or of a bodily disorder, a symptom; a sign of a bodily condition, recovery, or health.
  9. (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.1610–1614, John Fletcher, “The Tragedie of Valentinian”, in Comedies and Tragedies […], London: […] Humphrey Robinson, […], and for Humphrey Moseley […], published 1647, →OCLC, Act V, scene iv
  10. 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.
  11. 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...1864 August 6, “Miners and Their Grievances”, in The Spectator, volume 37, number 1884, page 902
    • 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...1873, Richard Fynes, The Miners of Northumberland and Durham, page 110
  12. A thin bed of coal indicating the existence of a thicker seam at no great distance.
  13. 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...2020 January 2, Graeme Pickering, “Fuelling the changes on Teesside rails”, in Rail, page 61
  14. In a loom, a colored signal to show the weaver which shuttle to use.
  15. (Church of Scotland) A piece of metal given beforehand to each person in the congregation who is permitted to partake of the Lord's Supper.

Adjective

token (comparative more token, superlative 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
    • He made a token tap on the brake pedal at the stop sign.
  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.
    • The television show was primarily directed toward a black audience, but it did have a few token white people as performers.

Verb

token (third-person singular simple present tokens, present participle tokening, simple past and past participle 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.1398, in Hans Kurath & Sherman M. Kuhn, eds., Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press 1962, page 1242
    • The instinct revolted against the inevitable punishment to come, already tokened by those big holes now met in walls and crossings.1928, Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, Penguin, published 2010, page 149
  2. To betroth
  3. To symbolize, instantiate
    • In which sense does ‘∀p ~(p & ~p)’ cause the tokening of the belief in the subject?2008 August 27, Mikkel Gerken, “Is There a Simple Argument for Higher-Order Representation Theories of Awareness Consciousness?”, in Erkenntnis, volume 69, number 2, →DOI

token meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

token in Hindi

टोकन

token in Tamil

டோக்கன்

token in Marathi

टोकन

token in Urdu

token, souvenir, memento, memorabilia
نشانی niśānī
More languagesFewer languages
token in Bengali
টোকেন, নিদর্শন, প্রতীক, চিহ্ন
token in Telugu
ఆనవాలు ānavālu, సంజ్ఞ sañjña, కతము katamu
token in Malayalam
സംജ്ഞ sañjña
token in Kannada
ಅಂಗಮಚ್ಚ aṅgamacca
token in Punjabi
ਟੋਕਨ
token in Gujarati
સંભારણું sambhārṇũ
token in Odia
ଧ୍ୱଜ dhwaja
token in Nepali
टोकन, टोकेन
token in Arabic
الرمو, رَمْز ramz
token in Persian
ژتون žeton

Examples of token in a sentence

  • They were tokens, however: the majority of oppressed people will not experience these benefits.2013, Robert J. Durán, Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider's Journey, page 208:
  • 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).2013, Vicki Smith, Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia, page 485:
  • 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.2026 March 22, Adam Willems, “New crypto regulations likely to be big favor to the Trump family, industry insiders say”, in The Guardian...
  • If the as had been reduced to a token in 240 BC, it was now a little more token than before.1927, Arthur Robert Burns, Money and Monetary Policy in Early Times, page 393:

All 40 example sentences with token

Synonyms of token

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of token

Forms of token

Noun
pluraltokens
Adjective
comparativemore token
superlativemost token
Verb
third-person singular presenttokens
present participletokening
past participletokened
pasttokened

Plural of token: tokens

Origin of token

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.

Words formed from token

Phrases with token

Words that rhyme with token

Questions about token

What does token mean?
Token means something serving as an expression of something else.
What is token in Hindi?
Token in Hindi is टोकन. See Token meaning in Hindi.
How do you use token in a sentence?
They were tokens, however: the majority of oppressed people will not experience these benefits.
What part of speech is token?
Token can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
How do you pronounce token?
Token is pronounced /ˈtəʊkən/ (UK).
What is the plural of token?
The plural of token is tokens.

Words near token in the dictionary

  1. tokei-gakari
  2. Tokelau
  3. Tokelau Islands
  4. Tokelauan
  5. Tokelauans
  6. token
  7. token bucket
  8. token buckets
  9. token economies
  10. token economy
  11. token money

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: token (page history and authors); token (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); token (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); token (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); نشانی (Urdu) (page history and authors); token (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ఆనవాలు (Telugu) (page history and authors); സംജ്ഞ (Malayalam) (page history and authors); ಅಂಗಮಚ್ಚ (Kannada) (page history and authors); token (Punjabi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); સંભારણું (Gujarati) (page history and authors); ଧ୍ୱଜ (Odia) (page history and authors); token (Nepali, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-token.ogg.

Cite this entry: “token.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/token. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.