DadgogoAI Dictionary

Dictionary entry

tokenizer

noun \ˈtō-kə-ˌnī-zər\
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Definition of tokenizer

  1. : the component that splits text into tokens before it goes into a model, and joins tokens back into text afterward

    • Different models use different tokenizers, so the same prompt can have different token counts.
    • A strange tokenizer quirk explains why some models struggled to count letters in a word.

Origin & history

Most modern tokenizers are based on byte-pair encoding, a 1994 compression technique adapted for language models around 2016.

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Cite this entry

"Tokenizer." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/tokenizer/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

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