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What is Tokenisation?

Verified 5 August 2026

Straightforward for space-delimited languages and genuinely hard otherwise. Chinese, Japanese and Thai write without spaces, so a tokeniser must either segment statistically or fall back to character n-grams.

Character bigrams are robust: they need no language-specific model, they degrade gracefully on mixed-script text, and the same rule applies at index and query time so the two always agree.

Common questions

What is Tokenisation?

Tokenisation splits text into indexable units — usually words, but character n-grams for scripts without word delimiters.

How does Tokenisation work in practice?

Character bigrams are robust: they need no language-specific model, they degrade gracefully on mixed-script text, and the same rule applies at index and query time so the two always agree.

See it working

The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.