token [OE] ‘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.