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The tilde (, also ) (2025). 9780550101051, Chambers. ISBN 9780550101051 is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English language from Spanish language , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in combination with a base letter. Its freestanding form is used in modern texts mainly to indicate approximation.
The text of the Domesday Book of 1086, relating for example, to the manor of Molland in Devon (see adjacent picture), is highly abbreviated as indicated by numerous tildes.
The text with abbreviations expanded is as follows:
The tilde symbol did not exist independently as a movable type or hot-lead printing character since the for Spanish or Portuguese would include sorts for the accented forms.
| Serif: | —~— | |
| Sans-serif: | —~— | |
| Monospace: | —~— | |
| A free-standing tilde between two em dashes in three font families | ||
The first ASCII standard (X3.64-1963) did not have a tilde. Like Portuguese and Spanish, the French, German and Scandinavia languages also needed symbols in excess of the basic 26 needed for English. The ASA worked with and through the CCITT to internationalize the code-set, to meet the basic needs of at least the Western European languages.
Thus ISO646 was born (and the ASCII standard updated to X3.64-1967), providing the tilde and other symbols as optional characters.
ISO646 and ASCII incorporated many of the overprinting lower-case diacritics from typewriters, including tilde. Overprinting was intended to work by putting a backspace code between the codes for letter and diacritic. See paragraph 2
The free-standing tilde is at code 126 in ASCII, where it was inherited into Unicode as U+007E.
A similar shaped mark () is known in typography and lexicography as a swung dash: these are used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word.
In Spanish itself the word tilde is used more generally for diacritics, including the stress-marking acute accent. Diccionario de la lengua española, Real Academia Española The diacritic is more commonly called virgulilla or la tilde de la eñe, and is not considered an accent mark in Spanish, but rather simply a part of the letter (much like tittle over makes an character that is familiar to readers of English).
In more recent digital usage, tildes on either side of a word or phrase have sometimes come to convey a particular tone that "lets the enclosed words perform both sincerity and irony", which can pre-emptively defuse a negative reaction. For example, BuzzFeed News journalist Joseph Bernstein interprets the tildes in the following tweet:
in the ~ spirit of the season ~ will now link to some of the (imho) #Bestof2014 sports reads. if you hate nice things, mute that hashtag.
as a way of making it clear that both the author and reader are aware that the enclosed phrase – "spirit of the season" – "is cliche and we know this quality is beneath our author, and we don't want you to think our author is a cliche person generally".
Among other uses, the symbol has been used on social media to indicate sarcasm. It may also be used online, especially in informal writing such as fan fiction, to convey a cutesy, playful, or flirtatious tone.
The tilde was also used occasionally to make other abbreviations, such as over the letter , making , ("that"). It also appears for qua and together with the letter to form for pra.
In Breton language, the symbol after a vowel means that the letter serves only to give the vowel a nasalised pronunciation, without being itself pronounced, as it normally is. For example, gives the pronunciation whereas gives .
In the DMG romanization of Tunisian Arabic, the tilde is used for nasal vowels õ and ṏ.
A tilde between two indicates optionality, or "alternates with". E.g. could indicate that the sounds may alternate depending on context (free variation), or that they vary based on region or speaker, or some other variation.
In some languages (such as in French), a tilde or a tilde-like wave dash (Unicode: ) may be used as a punctuation mark (instead of an unspaced hyphen, en dash or em dash) between two , to indicate a range. Doing so avoids the risk of confusion with subtraction or a hyphenated number (such as a part number or model number). For example, "12~15" means "12 to 15", "~3" means "up to three", and "100~" means "100 and greater". East Asian languages almost always use this convention, but it is sometimes done for clarity in some other languages as well. Chinese language uses the wave dash and full-width em dash interchangeably for this purpose. In English, the tilde is often used to express ranges and model numbers in electronics, but rarely in formal grammar or in type-set documents, as a wavy dash preceding a number sometimes represents an approximation (see below).
The range tilde is used for various purposes in French language, but only to denote ranges of numbers (e.g., « 21~32 degrés Celsius »" means "21 to 32 degrees Celsius").
(The symbol (a double tilde) is also used in French, for example, « ≈400 mètres » means "approximately 400 meters".)
The symbols ≈ (almost equal to) and ≅ (approximately equal to) are among the other symbols used to express approximation.
When used in conversations via email or instant messenger it may be used as a sarcasm mark.
The sign is used as a replacement for the , katakana character, in Japanese, extending the final syllable.
In written mathematical logic, the tilde represents negation: "~ p" means "not p", where " p" is a proposition. Modern use often replaces the tilde with the negation symbol (¬) for this purpose, to avoid confusion with equivalence relations.
The tilde can indicate approximate equality in a variety of ways. It can be used to denote the asymptotic equality of two functions. For example, means that .
A tilde is also used to indicate "Approximation equal to" (e.g. 1.902 ~= 2). This usage probably developed as a typed alternative to the libra symbol used for the same purpose in written mathematics, which is an equal sign with the upper bar replaced by a bar with an upward hump, bump, or loop in the middle (︍︍♎︎) or, sometimes, a tilde (≃). The symbol "≈" is also used for this purpose.
In physics and astronomy, a tilde can be used between two expressions (e.g. ) to state that the two are of the same order of magnitude.
In statistics and probability theory, the tilde means "is distributed as"; see random variable (e.g. for a binomial distribution).
A tilde can also be used to represent geometric similarity (e.g. , meaning triangle is similar to ). A triple tilde ( ≋) is often used to show congruence, an equivalence relation in geometry.
In graph theory, the tilde can be used to represent adjacency between vertices. The edge connects vertices and which can be said to be adjacent, and this adjacency can be denoted .
A tilde placed below a letter in mathematics can represent a Euclidean vector quantity (e.g. ).
In statistics and probability theory, a tilde placed on top of a variable is sometimes used to represent the median of that variable; thus would indicate the median of the variable . A tilde over the letter n () is sometimes used to indicate the harmonic mean.
In machine learning, a tilde may represent a candidate value for a cell state in GRUs or LSTM units. (e.g. c̃)
A tilde is also used in particle physics to denote the hypothetical supersymmetric partner. For example, an electron is referred to by the letter e, and its superpartner the selectron is written ẽ.
In multibody mechanics, the tilde operator maps three-dimensional vectors to skew-symmetrical matrices (see or ).
The tilde may represent some sort of phonetic or phonemic variation between two sounds, which might be or in free variation. For example, can represent "either or ".
In formal semantics, it is also used as a notation for the squiggle operator which plays a key role in many theories of focus.
In interlinear gloss, a tilde sets off an element added to a word by reduplication; were a hyphen or double hyphen used instead, confusion would arise because that element would be notated in the same way as an independent morpheme requiring an independent gloss.
Used in URLs on the World Wide Web, it often denotes a personal website on a Unix-based server. For example, might be the personal website of John Doe. This mimics the Unix shell usage of the tilde. However, when accessed from the web, file access is usually directed to a subdirectory in the user's home directory, such as or ..
In URLs, the characters (or ) may substitute for a tilde if an input device lacks a tilde key. Thus, and will behave in the same manner.
The operators are also used in the SQL variant of the database PostgreSQL.
A variant of this, with the plain tilde replaced with =~, was adopted in Perl. Ruby also uses this variant without the negated operator.
In C the tilde character is used as bitwise NOT unary operator, following the notation in logic (an ! causes a logical NOT, instead). This is also used by many languages based on or influenced by C, such as C++, C#, D, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and Python. The MySQL also use tilde as bitwise invert as does Microsoft's SQL Server Transact-SQL language.
In ASP.NET applications, tilde ('~') is used as a shortcut to the root of the application's virtual directory.
In the CSS stylesheet language, the tilde finds the element selected by the right-hand side that shares the parent with an element selected by the left-hand side.
In the D programming language, the tilde is used as bitwise not operator, concatenation operator such as those of arrays, and to indicate an object destructor. Tilde operator can be overloaded for user types, and binary tilde operator is mostly used to merging two objects, or adding some objects to set of objects. It was introduced because plus operator can have different meaning in many situations. For example, "120" + "14" may produce "134" (addition of two numbers), "12014" (concatenation of strings), or something else. D disallows + operator for arrays (and strings), and provides separate operator for concatenation (similarly PHP programming language solved this problem by using dot operator for concatenation, and + for number addition, which will also work on strings containing numbers).
In Eiffel, the tilde is used for object comparison. If a and b denote objects, the Boolean expression a ~ b has value true if and only if these objects are equal, as defined by the applicable version of the library routine is_equal, which by default denotes field-by-field object equality but can be redefined in any class to support a specific notion of equality. If a and b are references, the object equality expression a ~ b is to be contrasted with a = b which denotes reference equality. Unlike the call a. is_equal ( b), the expression a ~ b is type safety even in the presence of covariance.
In the Apache Groovy programming language the tilde character overloaded as a bitwise binary negation operation, and as the "pattern operator" that creates a regular expression pattern object. =~ and ==~ can in Groovy be used to match a regular expression.
In Haskell, the tilde is used in type constraints to indicate type equality.. Also, in pattern-matching, the tilde is used to indicate a lazy pattern match.
In the Inform 6 programming language, the tilde is used to indicate a quotation mark inside a quoted string. Tilde itself is created by @@126.
In "text mode" of the LaTeX typesetting language a tilde diacritic can be obtained using, e.g., \~{n}, yielding "ñ". A stand-alone tilde can be obtained by using \textasciitilde or \string~. In "math mode" a tilde diacritic can be written as, e.g., \tilde{x}. For a wider tilde \widetilde can be used. The \sim command produce a tilde-like binary relation symbol that is often used in mathematical expressions, and the double-tilde ≈ is obtained with \approx.In both text and math mode, a tilde on its own (~) renders a white space with no line breaking.In both text and math mode, a tilde on its own (~) renders a white space with no line breaking. The url package also supports entering tildes directly, e.g., <nowiki></nowiki>.
In MediaWiki syntax, four tildes are a shortcut for a user's signature. Three and five tildes puts the signature without timestamp and only the timestamp, respectively.
In Common Lisp, the tilde is used as the prefix for format specifiers in format strings.
In Max/MSP, MSP objects have names ending with a tilde. MSP objects process at the computer's sampling rate and mainly deal with sound.
In Standard ML, the tilde is used as the prefix for negative numbers and as the unary negation operator.
In OCaml, the tilde is used to specify the label for a labeled parameter.
In R, the tilde operator is used to separate the left- and right-hand sides in a model formula. The R Reference Index
In Object REXX, the twiddle is used as a "message send" symbol. For example, Employee.name~lower() would cause the lower() method to act on the object Employee's name attribute, returning the result of the operation. ~~ returns the object that received the method rather than the result produced. Thus, it can be used when the result need not be returned or when cascading methods are to be used. team~~insert("Jane")~~insert("Joe")~~insert("Steve") would send multiple concurrent insert messages, thus invoking the insert method three consecutive times on the team object.
In Raku, a prefixing tilde type conversion a value to a string. An infix tilde strings, taking place of the dot operator in Perl, as the dot is used for member access instead of . is called "the smartmatch operator" and its semantics depend on the type of the right-side argument. Namely, it checks numeric and string equalities, performs regular expression match tests (as opposed to in Perl), and type checking.
say $/; # outputs "Hello"
In YAML, the "Core schema," a set of aliases that processors are recommended to use, resolves a tilde as null.
Instructions for other national languages and keyboards are beyond the scope of this article.
Emacs also introduced an elaborate numbered backup scheme, with files named , and so on. It didn't catch on, as the rise of version control software eliminates the need for this usage.
The tilde symbol is also often used to prefix hidden temporary files that are created when a document is opened in Windows. For example, when a document "Document1.doc" is opened in Word, a file called "~$cument1.doc" is created in the same directory. This file contains information about which user has the file open, to prevent multiple users from attempting to change a document at the same time.
A tilde diacritic can be added to almost any character by using a combining tilde. Greek and Cyrillic letters with tilde (Α͂ᾶ, Η͂ῆ, Ι͂ῖ, ῗ, Υ͂ῦ, ῧ and А̃а̃, Ә̃ ә̃, Е̃е̃, И̃и̃, О̃о̃, У̃у̃, Ј̃j̃) are formed using this method.
This decision avoided a shape definition error in the original (6.2) Unicode code charts:. the wave dash reference glyph in JIS / Shift JIS matches the Unicode reference glyph for U+FF5E ,. while the original reference glyph for U+301C was reflected, incorrectly, when Unicode imported the JIS wave dash. In other platforms such as the classic Mac OS and macOS, 0x8160 is correctly mapped to U+301C. It is generally difficult, if not impossible, for users of Japanese Windows to type U+301C, especially in legacy, non-Unicode applications.
A similar situation exists regarding the Korean KS X 1001 character set, in which Microsoft maps the EUC-KR or UHC code for the wave dash (0xA1AD) to , while IBM and Apple map it to U+301C. Microsoft also uses U+FF5E to map the KS X 1001 raised tilde (0xA2A6), while Apple uses .
The current Unicode reference glyph for U+301C has been corrected to match the JIS standard in response to a 2014 proposal, which noted that while the existing Unicode reference glyph had been matched by fonts from the discontinued Windows XP, all other major platforms including later versions of Microsoft Windows shipped with fonts matching the JIS reference glyph for U+301C.
The JIS / Shift JIS wave dash is still formally mapped to U+301C as of JIS X 0213, whereas the WHATWG Encoding Standard used by HTML5 follows Microsoft in mapping 0x8160 to U+FF5E. These two code points have a similar or identical glyph in several , reducing the confusion and incompatibility.
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