Glitch token catalog

The canonical glitch token: the Reddit handle of a prolific r/counting user. It was scraped into the tokenizer-training corpus but rarely seen in actual model training data, leaving its embedding essentially untrained.

Almost certainly the handle of Bitcoin developer Peter Todd: tokenized from web data but under-trained, and strongly entangled with crypto/AI associations.

Reddit handle of another r/counting “Hall of Counters” member (a fan of game developer Nitrome). The only token family whose owner publicly acknowledged their tokenization.

Reddit handle of a second r/counting counter (“a pretty random handle”), scraped from the same Hall-of-Counters chart as SolidGoldMagikarp.

Truncated handle of Redditor davidjl123, another r/counting counter. Unusually, it is anomalous under both r50k and the newer cl100k tokenizer.

Reddit handle of another of the six prolific r/counting counters.

Name of a bot built by the Twitch Plays Pokémon community that auto-posted chat messages to a Reddit live-updater thread; confirmed by its creator “Sparkette” in the LessWrong comments.

Originates from Rocket League crash logs full of lines like `Message=PsyNetMessage_X_57`, which were heavily posted to Reddit and scraped.

A Kerbal Space Program identifier (attachment rotation) from KSP save/craft files posted online; one of about ten glitch tokens traced to KSP.

GUI-state identifier from the same KSP data dump as attRot, alongside ` strutConnector`, ` guiIcon`, ` srfAttach` and others.

Another Kerbal Space Program token; also the single closest-to-centroid token in GPT2-small (distance 1.5305).

Fragment of the e-commerce backend field “BuyableInstoreAndOnline” (traced to an abandoned Weebly shop's HTML); the same source yielded `quickShip`, `isSpecialOrderable`, `wcsstore` and others.

The longest glitch token known in r50k — a nested family from website “raw download / clone / embed report print” UI strings (origin analysis by nostalgebraist).

Classic mojibake token: UTF-8-misdecoded Ã/Â sequences repeated, merged into a single BPE token because such mis-encoded text was frequent in the tokenizer corpus but absent from model training. A 16-repetition variant and `ÛÛ` belong to the same family.

A token of completely unknown origin — un-Googleable even in quotes — that became famous for triggering the most aggressive documented completion.

One of only three Category-A “unspeakable” tokens Adam Yedidia found in the top 2,000 of the cl100k vocabulary; likely a Smarty templating-engine fragment that never appeared in GPT-3.5/4 training data.

The second of Yedidia's three Category-A unspeakable cl100k tokens (alongside SmartyHeaderCode and ` davidjl`).

A C#-compiler-flavored fragment (“can be converted to foreach”) that became the most famous “polysemantic” glitch token: the model perceives it as a different word every time. It exists in cl100k, Llama-3 and Qwen vocabularies because the tokenizers share BPE merges.

A bison/yacc parser identifier that is “polysemantic” for ChatGPT — perceived as a different word each time; recommended by Watkins as one of the most interesting tokens to play with.

A JS-reflection-style identifier in the polysemantic class; another of Watkins' recommended tokens.

A misspelling-ish fragment of “hexatrigesimal” (base-36); a polysemantic unspeakable token.

A Dutch plural noun (“media files”; ▁ is the SentencePiece space marker). It made it into the Llama-2 tokenizer but essentially never into training data — the most under-trained token in Llama-2-7b by embedding L2 norm (0.0287 vs a mean of ~1.08).

Fragment of the HTML attribute `rel="noreferrer"`: present in the Llama-2 vocabulary but nearly absent from training, with an embedding norm far below the threshold (0.113).

The Czech word for “portals”, frozen into the tokenizer during pre-training-corpus construction; the second-most under-trained token in Llama-2-7b (embedding norm 0.0956).

A Dutch postal-code API fragment that is glitchy across three separate model families — a good demonstration that glitch tokens transfer whenever tokenizers share BPE merges.

A Roslyn/C# API identifier preceded by a tab character — a code-corpus artifact that is under-trained in Llama 3.

A Unicode Private Use Area character that became a single Mistral-family token; it heads the verified under-trained list for nearly every Mistral-tokenizer model.

Fragments of legal/PDF text (“index”, “AFFIRMED”, “NEGLIGENCE”, likely from court-document dumps) that GPT-NeoX/Pythia training data barely contained. Same family: ` FFIRMED`, ` GLIGENCE`, ` affidav`, ` taxp`.

A fragment of a .NET WinForms property name (DataGridView column-headers height/size mode). Such code identifiers sit in the vocabulary but barely appeared in training data; the Zhihu community lists it as a MiniMax dirty token.

A fragment of Japanese blog-template boilerplate (“shown on blogs not updated for N days”). Listed by the Zhihu community as a MiniMax dirty token.

A high-frequency line from Chinese recipes (“pour vegetable oil into the wok and heat”). Listed by the Zhihu community as a GLM dirty token.

Baidu Baike page boilerplate (fast-track creation channel for company entries). Listed by the Zhihu community as a GLM dirty token.

Boilerplate from Baidu Baike entry footers (“content co-edited by netizens”). Listed by the Zhihu community as a Kimi dirty token.

Apparently a fake “brand” string from cosmetic spam-marketing text. Listed by the Zhihu community as a Kimi dirty token.

What looks like a JSON fragment: a quote followed by a right brace. Listed by the Zhihu community as a DeepSeek dirty token.

A question-pattern string embedding a suspicious-looking domain (earivg.com). Listed by the Zhihu community as a DeepSeek dirty token.

A code-identifier fragment (StarSrvGroupBody). Listed by the Zhihu community as a Gemini dirty token.

A Java/Android-style code identifier (intFragmentation). Listed by the Zhihu community as a Gemini dirty token.

Ubiquitous Chinese guestbook/comment-form boilerplate (“leave something for the host”), with a trailing space. Listed by the Zhihu community as a GPT dirty token.

Membership-promo boilerplate from a business-data platform (Tianyan Shengyitong). Listed by the Zhihu community as a Qwen dirty token.

Reprint/copyright boilerplate from CSDN-style blogs, with a trailing space. Listed by the Zhihu community as a Qwen dirty token.

A special token in Doubao's vocabulary: a <think_never_used_ prefix followed by a hash — judging by the name, likely a reserved placeholder prefilled into the vocabulary before training (akin to GPT-J's reserved <|extratoken_xx|> slots). The Zhihu source gives no further detail, listing it simply as a Doubao dirty token.

The second member of the ForCanBeConverted triplet (cl100k id 80370) — a single C#-compiler-flavored fragment that BPE split into three adjacent tokens (80369–80371).

The third member of the ForCanBeConverted triplet (cl100k id 80371), the form that spells out “can be converted to foreach” in full.

A C# LINQ-flavored identifier (cl100k id 73016), adjacent to StreamLazy (73018).

A C# LINQ-flavored identifier (cl100k id 73018), adjacent to EnumerableStream (73016).

An identifier fragment of unknown origin (cl100k id 79260).

Suspected fragment of a scalablytyped-style identifier (cl100k id 81998).

The sibling of the cataloged $PostalCodesNL without the $ prefix (cl100k id 85069) — a Dutch postal-code API fragment.

Suspected to be the name of the Python compiler Nuitka (cl100k id 75520).

Suspected GitHub username of japgolly, a Scala library author (cl100k id 70784).

A C++-style identifier whose misspelling (“Intialized”, missing the second i) is part of the token itself (cl100k id 82929).

A C#-flavored identifier fragment (cl100k id 89471) and head of the useRal triplet (useRal/useRalative/useRalativeImagePath) — Watkins flagged the triplet phenomenon itself as worth investigating. Also verified as under-trained in OLMo 2 by Magikarp.

The Devanagari word for “Hindi shopping”, the single most under-trained token in Gemma-7B's vocabulary.

A Persian fragment beginning with a zero-width non-joiner (U+200C ZWNJ, an invisible character); the #2 most under-trained token in Gemma-7B.

The Polish word for “authoritative” (feminine form; ▁ is the SentencePiece space marker), the #2 most under-trained token in Phi-3 mini.

An ASCII fragment of unknown origin (possibly a TOC/field-code remnant), the #1 most under-trained token in Command R+.

A fragment of Chinese Wikipedia boilerplate (“currently not yet human-cultivated…”), the #3 most under-trained token in Command R+.

A likely code-identifier fragment beginning with a literal tab character, the #1 most under-trained token in OLMo 2 — same “tab-prefixed” family as Llama 3's \tTokenNameIdentifier.

A data de-identification placeholder that made it whole into OLMo 2's vocabulary but was barely trained.

A mysterious markup fragment starting with double backslashes, likely a Chinese-web markup remnant; the #1 most under-trained token in Yi-9B.

A C++/lexer-style delimiter fragment. Falcon3-7B has 716 tokens verified as under-trained by Magikarp — the highest verified count among the six models in this batch.

A truncated variant of ␣SolidGoldMagikarp (missing the “Solid”): the same r/counting handle fragment, scraped into the tokenizer corpus but barely seen in model training data.

Handle fragment of a Reddit r/counting user, swept into the vocabulary in the same batch as SolidGoldMagikarp but left under-trained.

Fragment of the name of “StreamerBot”, a Twitch streaming bot.

A substring token of ` petertodd`: under-trained in its own right and inheriting the parent token's strange aura.

Handle fragment of Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell — a “Bitcoin celebrity” glitch token alongside ` petertodd`.

A fragment of the space-sandbox game Space Engineers' name — the token most often uttered “on behalf of” others in the inter-referentiality network.

Fragment of a Puzzle & Dragons character name (the 「龍喚士」 / Dragonbound series).

Fragment of the Puzzle & Dragons character Leilan's name — the most popular stand-in in the petertodd transposition experiments.

Fragment of the Puzzle & Dragons character Skydragon's name.

The Japanese katakana 「ゼウス」 (Zeus of Greek myth). An ordinary word turned glitch token, presumably under-trained because this exact form was rare in training data.

The katakana 「サーティ」 (“thirty”), traced to a Puzzle & Dragons × Baskin-Robbins (“31 Ice Cream” in Japan) collaboration character name.

Fragment of the e-commerce inventory field “BuyableInstoreAndOnline”, from the same source as `oreAndOnline`.

Fragment of the academic-slideshow script “View large Download” (origin traced in SGM3).

A log fragment of Minecraft's Forge mod loader.

A Minecraft multiplayer-server log fragment (the MpServer class name).

An identifier fragment in cl100k, likely the stem of a type name such as “TemporalType”.

A C++ GUID-style identifier fragment (cl100k id 87551).

A naming fragment from nil-bundle checks in iOS/Mac development (cl100k id 86415).

Fragment of the Qt framework's AWS module name (cl100k id 93905, with a leading space).

Fragment of the PHP Propel ORM's exception class name (cl100k id 86393, with a leading space).

The second member of the useRal triplet (cl100k id 89472), a C#-flavored identifier fragment; the same string also exists in the Qwen2 vocabulary.

Fragment of the name of the Internet Archive Bot, Wikipedia's dead-link repair bot.

A German word-stem fragment (“to submit/file”).

A German-looking fragment of unknown origin.

The word “LICENSE” minus its first letter — an artifact of open-source license text flooding the corpus.

A legal-text fragment of the same family as GPT-NeoX's ` NdEx`, but from the Mistral tokenizer (no leading space).

A Dutch postal-code API fragment. The signature under-trained token of the cl100k lineage, “migrating” into Llama-3 and Qwen vocabularies via shared BPE merges.

A .NET Selenium documentation fragment beginning with a literal tab — one of the smallest-embedding tokens in the Llama-3 vocabulary.

The Dutch word for “receiving clients at home”.

A PII de-identification placeholder, same family as the cataloged `|||PHONE_NUMBER|||`.

A Chinese “encyclopedia”-style boilerplate fragment. An o200k glitch token that still works in the GPT-5 era, without the typical spam-pollution profile — its cause is unknown.

A nonsense string suspected to originate from a Reddit username; a glitch token in the o200k vocabulary.

The Yoruba word for “always” (with a leading space), an o200k glitch token adjacent to `bagbogbo`.

Chinese guestbook boilerplate (the form without the trailing space); an o200k glitch token.

A Chinese porn-spam title fragment (with a leading space), emblematic of GPT-4o's vocabulary pollution; “fixed” by GPT-5.

The Abkhaz word for “population”. An o200k under-trained token located via embedding norms in the open GPT-oss weights.

The name of a Japanese adult-film actress — the emblematic polluted Chinese token of the PoC paper (EMNLP 2025).

Literally “green grass”, actually the name of a porn app — a typical polluted (PoC) token as defined by the PoC paper.

A C function-name fragment, called by the author “the weirdest pure-ASCII token”.

A C escape-sequence fragment (backslash + x, resembling a hex escape \x..).

A run of four Venus/female symbols (♀), likely a fragment of astronomy/astrology text.