"tokenization" meaning in English

See tokenization in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: tokenizations [plural]
Etymology: From token + -ization. Etymology templates: {{suffix|en|token|ization}} token + -ization Head templates: {{en-noun|~}} tokenization (countable and uncountable, plural tokenizations)
  1. The act or process of tokenizing. Tags: countable, uncountable
    Sense id: en-tokenization-en-noun-Haufhfbs Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English terms suffixed with -ization, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 49 51 Disambiguation of English terms suffixed with -ization: 46 54 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 55 45 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 53 47
  2. An instance created by that act or process: something tokenized. Tags: countable, uncountable
    Sense id: en-tokenization-en-noun-JMifgZu3 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English terms suffixed with -ization, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 49 51 Disambiguation of English terms suffixed with -ization: 46 54 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 55 45 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 53 47
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Derived forms: detokenization, retokenization

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

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  "derived": [
    {
      "_dis1": "0 0",
      "word": "detokenization"
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  "etymology_templates": [
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  "etymology_text": "From token + -ization.",
  "forms": [
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      "form": "tokenizations",
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  "head_templates": [
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          "source": "w+disamb"
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          "_dis": "55 45",
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          "ref": "2026 August 10, Nina Bambysheva, “$5.5 Trillion Bet: Why Every Major Bank Is Racing To Put Wall Street On The Blockchain”, in Forbes:",
          "text": "Last week Wells Fargo, the country’s fourth-largest bank with about $2.3 trillion in assets, said it would offer tokenized deposits to corporate and commercial clients this fall. Not long ago, the announcement would have been written off as yet another blockchain trial balloon. Today, it looks more like keeping up with the competition. […] Tokenization is at last becoming a Wall Street business, not merely a crypto slogan. So what is tokenization, and why does it actually matter? Tokenization is a mechanism for representing an asset, or a claim on one, with a digital token on a blockchain, which is an immutable digital ledger. The asset might be a stock, Treasury bill, money market fund or bank deposit. Sometimes the token is part of the official ownership record; sometimes it is effectively a receipt for an asset held elsewhere. What tokenization changes is not the asset, but how its ownership is recorded and transferred. […] Why is tokenization gaining momentum now? Wall Street has been experimenting with tokenization for years. […] Those projects proved that one part of a transaction could operate on a blockchain. They did not create complete markets. In many cases, the asset moved on-chain while payment still arrived by bank wire, custody remained on conventional systems, and the parties reconciled their records afterward. […] The bottom line: Tokenization is no longer merely a collection of pilots, but neither is it yet the wholesale transformation of finance its promoters have promised. It can make an asset easier to transfer, but it does not make a bad investment a good one, create liquidity where none exists, or turn a wrapper into the security it tracks.",
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        "The act or process of tokenizing."
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          "text": "This was an unlikely tokenization of the input string.",
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      "glosses": [
        "An instance created by that act or process: something tokenized."
      ],
      "id": "en-tokenization-en-noun-JMifgZu3",
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{
  "categories": [
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    "English lemmas",
    "English nouns",
    "English terms suffixed with -ization",
    "English uncountable nouns",
    "Pages with 1 entry",
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  ],
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  "etymology_text": "From token + -ization.",
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              948,
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            ],
            [
              1023,
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              1370,
              1382
            ]
          ],
          "ref": "2026 August 10, Nina Bambysheva, “$5.5 Trillion Bet: Why Every Major Bank Is Racing To Put Wall Street On The Blockchain”, in Forbes:",
          "text": "Last week Wells Fargo, the country’s fourth-largest bank with about $2.3 trillion in assets, said it would offer tokenized deposits to corporate and commercial clients this fall. Not long ago, the announcement would have been written off as yet another blockchain trial balloon. Today, it looks more like keeping up with the competition. […] Tokenization is at last becoming a Wall Street business, not merely a crypto slogan. So what is tokenization, and why does it actually matter? Tokenization is a mechanism for representing an asset, or a claim on one, with a digital token on a blockchain, which is an immutable digital ledger. The asset might be a stock, Treasury bill, money market fund or bank deposit. Sometimes the token is part of the official ownership record; sometimes it is effectively a receipt for an asset held elsewhere. What tokenization changes is not the asset, but how its ownership is recorded and transferred. […] Why is tokenization gaining momentum now? Wall Street has been experimenting with tokenization for years. […] Those projects proved that one part of a transaction could operate on a blockchain. They did not create complete markets. In many cases, the asset moved on-chain while payment still arrived by bank wire, custody remained on conventional systems, and the parties reconciled their records afterward. […] The bottom line: Tokenization is no longer merely a collection of pilots, but neither is it yet the wholesale transformation of finance its promoters have promised. It can make an asset easier to transfer, but it does not make a bad investment a good one, create liquidity where none exists, or turn a wrapper into the security it tracks.",
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        "An instance created by that act or process: something tokenized."
      ],
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}

Download raw JSONL data for tokenization meaning in English (3.2kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (d6fca27 and 65e1673). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.