How to remap a key to several characters in AutoHotKey?

I'm making a keyboard layout where nearly every key maps to several characters. I know the usual syntax for remapping a key to a single other key is a::b, but that doesn't seem to work for multiple letters on the right hand side (e.g. j::the), and separating with spaces or commas doesn't work. Then I tried using Send the but that seems to result in excessive recursion as AHK tells me that it detects a bunch of keystrokes in the past milliseconds when I press a key). How do I assign a key to multiple characters?

I also tried hotstrings with the syntax ::j::the but that seems to only activate when I press space after typing.

Hotstrings can indicate options, with the syntax :options:hotkey::string. An asterisk can be used to set the hotstring trigger to nothing (normally it's space). So for the j key to output the, type :*:j::the.