token

Etymology

From Middle English token, taken, from Old English tācn (“sign”), from Proto-West Germanic *taikn, from Proto-Germanic *taikną, from Proto-Indo-European *deyḱ- (“to show, instruct, teach”) with Germanic *k rather than *h by Kluge's law. The verb is from Middle English toknen, from Old English tācnian. Cognate with German Zeichen.

noun

1. Something serving as an expression of something else.
   According to the Bible, the rainbow is a token of God's covenant with Noah.
2. A keepsake.
   Please accept this bustier as a token of our time together.
3. A piece of stamped metal or plastic, etc., used as a substitute for money; 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.
   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
      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 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
6. (obsolete, sometimes figurative) Evidence, proof; a confirming detail; physical trace, mark, footprint.
7. Support for a belief; grounds for an opinion.
8. An extraordinary event serving as evidence of supernatural power.
9. An object or disclosure to attest or authenticate the bearer or an instruction.
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.
12. A tally.
13. (philosophy) A particular thing to which a concept applies.
14. (computing) An atomic piece of data, such as a word, for which a meaning may be inferred during parsing.
    Coordinate term: placeholder
    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
15. (computing) 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.
16. (computing) A meaningless placeholder used as a substitute for sensitive data.
17. (grammar) A lexeme; a basic, grammatically indivisible unit of a language such as a keyword, operator or identifier.
18. (corpus linguistics) A single example of a certain word 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 Human-Oriented Computing, Springer-Verlag, page 10
19. (medicine) A characteristic sign of a disease or of a bodily disorder, a symptom; a sign of a bodily condition, recovery, or health.
20. (medicine, obsolete) A livid spot upon the body, indicating, or supposed to indicate, the approach of death.
21. (printing) 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.
22. (mining) 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 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.” August 6 1864, “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 with all the abuse and ill-treatment in the mine they had got little or nothing for working all day. 1873, Richard Fynes, The Miners of Northumberland and Durham, page 110
    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”. 1877, “Northern Industries”, in The Primitive Methodist Magazine, page 172
23. (mining) A thin bed of coal indicating the existence of a thicker seam at no great distance.
24. (rail transport) 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 option in the 21st century than putting in an additional token machine." January 2 2020, Graeme Pickering, “Fuelling the changes on Teesside rails”, in Rail, page 61
25. (weaving) In a loom, a colored signal to show the weaver which shuttle to use.
26. (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.

adj

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.
   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
   It sounds very token, another damp squib which will probably end up benefiting more bureaucrats than artists or scientists. 1999-06-30, Fiachra Gibbons, quoting John Calder, “Arts and science ‘damp squib’”, in The Guardian
   There are still many churches where the participation of women is token. 2000, Cheris Kramarae, Dale Spender, Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women, page 176
3. (of people) Included in minimal numbers in order to create an impression or illusion of diversity, especially ethnic or gender diversity.
   However, it should be noted that wherever ministers are opposed to mixed churches, the racial admixture is token. 1958, Social Problems - Volume 6, page 158
   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. 1993, United States. Federal Communications Commission, FCC Record, page 7560
   Even appointees who knew their positions were token would coolly take from the situation whatever benefits they could get. 1995, Christine N. Qunta, Who's Afraid of Affirmative Action, page 54
   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. 1996, William G. Tierney, Estela Mara Bensimon, Promotion and Tenure: Community and Socialization in Academe, page 96
   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. 2000, Journal of Applied Rehabilitation Counseling - Volume 31, page 51
   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. 2014, Christopher F. Karpowitz, Tali Mendelberg, The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions, page 117
   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

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
   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. 2018, Fred Rush, “Wittgenstein and the Craft of Reading: On Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Reading by Charles Altieri”, in Philosophy and Literature, volume 42, number 1, pages 236–37
2. To betroth
3. (philosophy) To symbolize, instantiate
   In which sense does ‘∀p ~(p & ~p)’ cause the tokening of the belief in the subject? August 27, 2008, Mikkel Gerken, “Is There a Simple Argument for Higher-Order Representation Theories of Awareness Consciousness?”, in Erkenntnis, volume 69, number 2, →DOI