The distinction is important in disciplines such as logic, linguistics, metalogic, typography, and computer programming.
Other logicians counter that the word type has a permanence and constancy not found in the class of its tokens.
[citation needed] In typography, the type–token distinction is used to determine the presence of a text printed by movable type:[1] The defining criteria which a typographic print has to fulfill is that of the type identity of the various letter forms which make up the printed text.
In other words: each letter form which appears in the text has to be shown as a particular instance ("token") of one and the same type which contains a reverse image of the printed letter.The distinctions between using words as types or tokens were first made by American logician and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in 1906 using terminology that he established.
A common mode of estimating the amount of matter in a ... printed book is to count the number of words.