Glossary / Artificial intelligenceJune 3, 2026

Token (in the context of LLM)

A token is the minimum unit of text in language models. What is it, why is Russian text more expensive than English and how it affects the work with AI tools.

Section: Artificial intelligenceUpdated: June 3, 2026

A token is the minimum unit of text that a language model works with. This is not always a word: one Russian word is often broken into 2-4 tokens, and the Russian text on average consumes 1.5-2 times more tokens than English of the same length. The model reads, processes and generates text with tokens.

For professionals, tokens are important at two points:

  1. In working with the API, the cost of the request is considered in tokens, so a long prompt with excess water is literally more expensive.

  2. In a content strategy, dense and specific text without water is more efficiently processed by the model when quoting in AI responses.

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