tilde

plural tildes

1. A diacritical mark ⟨˜⟩ placed above a letter to modify its pronunciation.
   1. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩ is a palatalized ⟨n⟩, for example in ⟨cañón⟩.

      California, like several other states, prohibits the use of diacritical marks or accents on official documents. That means no tilde (~), no accent grave (`), no umlaut (¨) and certainly no cedilla (¸).

      2015 April 11, Tovin Lapan, “California birth certificates and accents: O’Connor alright, Ramón and José is not”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 04 Apr 2025

   2. In Portuguese, ⟨ã⟩ and ⟨õ⟩ are nasalized vowels, for example in ⟨canção⟩.

      The tilde was used similarly in Portuguese on vowels to show that the letter bearing the tilde should be pronounced nasally.

      2021, Claire Cock-Starkey, Hyphens & Hashtags, Bodleian Library, page 162

   3. The Vietnamese tone mark dấu ngã, which is placed above a vowel to indicate a creaky rising tone (thanh ngã).
   4. The apex, a curved diacritic used in the 17th century to mark final nasalization in the early Vietnamese alphabet. It was an adoption of the Portuguese tilde.
2. A symbol ⟨~⟩, with various names and uses, also known as swung dash or wave dash. In the computer industry, various other names may be used, such as squiggle and twiddle.

   1 more example

   swung dash A stock keyboard character, used in mathematics as the sign of similarity (a ~ b) and in lexicography as a sign of repetition. The same sign has been used in symbolic logic to indicate negation, but to avoid confusion, the angular negation symbol (¬) is preferred. Not to be confused with the tilde.

   1992, Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

   1. The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII character set, and later in the 1992 Unicode character set.
   2. A punctuation mark that indicates range (from a number to another number). This use is common in Asia, where the symbol in this case is also called a wave dash.
   3. In lexicography, the ⟨~⟩ symbol is used to indicate the repetition of the topical word or item. In this case, the symbol is also called a swung dash.
   4. May be used to represent approximation, in English prose and in mathematics. For example, “My dog weighs ~30 pounds.”
   5. human sciencesAn alternate form of the logical negation operator, which is usually written as ¬.