What is a printable symbol that can have phonetic or pictographic meaning?

The correct answer is a glyph. A glyph is a specific symbol or character that conveys meaning and can represent various forms like phonetic sounds in linguistics or pictorial concepts in graphical contexts.

Characters are often the basic building blocks used in programming and text representation, including letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, but they don’t necessarily carry meaning on their own without context. In contrast, a glyph goes beyond just being a character; it encapsulates ideas through its appearance and can convey symbolic meaning.

Tokens typically refer to data structures in programming that represent entities such as keywords or operators but are not generally associated with meaning in a phonetic or pictographic sense. A string is simply a sequence of characters and doesn’t embody meaning by itself.

Thus, the choice of glyph as the answer effectively highlights the nature of printable symbols that encapsulate phonetic or pictographic meanings.