The term “design token” seems to have been invented at Salesforce as part of their design system a decade ago. Apparently the “token” part is the value of a configuration property and at minimum you need a key-value pair defining the property. There is an ecosystem where configuration files are used to exchange data between design tools for standardizing things like colors.

It’s kind of wild that this whole ecosystem evolved without previously coming up much on Hacker News, but that’s just how it goes. Inventing jargon isn’t bad. There is certainly a lot of programming jargon that we inflict on others.