collecting tokens

The word token has many meanings, having synonyms such as symbol, memento, or representative:

1. I give you this squid as a token of my affection.
2. I’ll keep these pants forever as a token of my holiday escapades.
3. I posted this photo of a duck in the dishwasher as a token of the many pictures I’ve taken of random things.

A token can also be a conventionalized object, such as a metal coin or plastic figure, used in place of money for some transactions or used in some sort of group activity, like a game.

4. I’m not sure what to do with my old subway tokens now that they’ve started using Charlie Cards.
5. My old Monopoly game was missing half its tokens.

In my world, though, the most frequent use of the word token is the meaning used in linguistics. In linguistics, a token is an instance of some form that is being studied, an item of a particular category or class.

This is an excerpt from a post from April 2007. Want to read more about tokens in linguistics? See my full post.