Dictionary entry
tokenizer
TopicFundamentals Senses1
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Definition of tokenizer
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: 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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