token
/ˈtəʊk(ə)n
/noun
1A thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality, feeling, etc. mistletoe was cut from an oak tree as a token of good fortune I wanted to offer you a small token of my appreciation...
- Except for a few very visible tokens, the voices and lives of women are trivialized, if not simply cropped out of the scene altogether, and this is the crux of the problem.
- His work was almost always meant to have the quality of a personal token, rather than that of an object for public display.
- In the 1800s, puzzle purses became popular: the Valentine was carefully folded, so its recipient had to refold it to read the messages and find the love tokens concealed therein.
Synonyms
symbol, sign, emblem, badge, representation, indication, mark, index, manifestation, expression, pledge, demonstration, recognition;
evidence, attestation, proof
memento, souvenir, keepsake, reminder, record, trophy, relic, remembrance, memorial
archaic memorandum
1.1 archaic A badge or favour worn to indicate allegiance to a particular person or party: Ruthven was murdered and the assassin left his token
1.2 archaic A word or object conferring authority on or serving to authenticate the speaker or holder: you should have a token that will stand you in good stead if ever you should fall foul of the prince’s officers
1.3A staff or other object given to a train driver on a single-track railway as authority to proceed over a given section of line.
2A voucher that can be exchanged for goods or services, typically one given as a gift or forming part of a promotional offer: a record token...
- So if your budget stretches to it, a book or record token or gift voucher as well may not go amiss.
- Keep and use all the coupons and tokens you get free, but only if they're for items you would buy anyway.
- The other two section winners each receive £75 shopping vouchers and leisure tokens as well as a trophy.
Synonyms
voucher, coupon, chit, docket, stamp, order, credit note, IOU
British informal chitty
2.1A metal or plastic disc used to operate a machine or in exchange for particular goods or services: a milk token...
- The gaming system avoids having to use coins or tokens in the operation of slot machines.
- They were operated by tokens rather than money.
- The couple say they got into trouble when a woman and her Jamaican boyfriend gave them tokens for gambling machines in a casino during the holiday.
Synonyms
counter, disc, substitute coin, jetton, chip, piece, man
3An individual occurrence of a symbol or string, in particular:Of course, one cannot write down a token of this infinite string....
- I'll leave the details to smarter people, but it is essentially a statistical method in which individual tokens are mapped to probabilities.
3.1 Linguistics An individual occurrence of a linguistic unit in speech or writing. Contrasted with type.In other words, speech sounds are merely the arbitrary tokens whereby linguistic exchange is carried out....
- As we increase the size of the corpus, the number of tokens of the morpheme will obviously increase.
- The percentage of tokens covered in this small academic corpus did not differ substantially from the percentage of tokens covered in the first part.
3.2 Computing The smallest meaningful unit of information in a sequence of data for a compiler.The operator starts with a literal hyphen, which is followed by a variable token, an expression and an optional block.
4 Computing A sequence of bits passed continuously between nodes in a fixed order and enabling a node to transmit information.The first field of bytes which is of fixed length is always present in every message and taken together, these bytes represent a unique message identifier called a token....
- This might involve the use of tokens or hard-to-break passwords, but the most important thing is that it is designed into how the applications are accessed and used in day-to-day work.
- This is typically done with a unique identifier such as a user name, ID card or a token.
adjective
1Done for the sake of appearances or as a symbolic gesture: cases like these often bring just token fines from magistrates...
- How does an apathetic agnostic even begin to redress a quarter-century of token gestures and guest appearances at church?
- Neither side called him, and he made one token appearance at the trial.
- But even the head acknowledges that her school is beyond such token gestures.
Synonyms
symbolic, emblematic, indicative;
peppercorn
perfunctory, slight, nominal, minimal, insignificant, minor, trivial, mild, hollow, unimportant, trifling, of no account, of no consequence, of no importance, not worth bothering about, not worth mentioning, inconsequential, superficial, small, tiny, minute, inappreciable, imperceptible, infinitesimal, nugatory, petty;
paltry, inadequate, insufficient, meagre, derisory, pitiful, pathetic, miserable
informal minuscule, piddling, piffling, measly, mingy, poxy
North American informal nickel-and-dime
rare exiguous
1.1 [attributive] Chosen by way of tokenism as a representative of a particular minority or under-represented group: she took offence at being called the token woman on the force...
- The second problem is that there is no way to police if the teams are just interviewing these minorities as token candidates to fit under the guidelines.
- She says U.S. companies boast diversity by including one token minority in advertisements and on TV shows.
- A funny, feisty couple, they joke about being token minority characters.
Phrases
by the same (or that or this) token
in token of
Derivatives
tokenize
- It also knows about their content, for instance, tokenizing embedded URLs differently from plain text.
- Some of these automation features are things like auto-typed variables which are tokenized throughout the project, and single-file projects that collect all relevant information in one place.
- All that is needed to do this is to remove ‘stop words’ such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘of’ and place the tokenized remainder of the full text in the description tag.
Origin
Old English tāc(e)n, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch teken and German Zeichen, also to teach.
‘He gave him…a cordial slap on the back, and some other equally gentle tokens of satisfaction’, wrote the novelist Fanny Burney in 1778. She was using token in the meaning it had had since Anglo-Saxon times, ‘a sign or symbol’. In the 17th and 18th centuries there was often a scarcity of small coins, and tradesmen issued their own coin-shaped pieces of metal to exchange for goods or cash. Such a disc was a token as it ‘symbolized’ or substituted for real money. Use of the word for a voucher, as in a book token, dates from the early 20th century.