Payments

The twenty-third entry is la tokenizzazione, and the word underneath it travelled a long way before it reached a card terminal. Everything about the Italian form looks learned: the ending -izzazione is the one behind organizzazione and privatizzazione, and it came into Italian from Greek by way of Latin. The root inside it did not. « Token » is one of the oldest words English owns — Old English tācen, a sign or a mark, the same word as German Zeichen, and a relative of « teach », which began as showing somebody something rather than telling them. A token has therefore always been a thing that stands in for another thing, which is exactly what a card network wanted: the number goes away and a substitute takes its place at the till. The everyday British senses keep that idea of a stand-in — a book token, a token gesture, a token strike. Italian borrowed the noun whole and built tokenizzare and la tokenizzazione on top of it, while its own word for a sign, il segno, from Latin signum, was never asked to do this job.