A type is a category of being. A human is a type of thing; a cloud is a type of thing; and so on. A particular instance of a type is called a token of that thing; so Socrates was a token of a human being, but is not any longer since he is dead. Likewise, the letter "A" is a token of the first letter of the Latin alphabet.

A type is something different in logic. See Bertrand Russell's Theory of types.