| Mark: | ~◌̃ |
| Tilde (symbol), Combining tilde (diacritic) | |
| Unicode: | |
| See Also: | Double tilde (disambiguation) |
The tilde (also)[1] is a grapheme (˜) or (~) with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, 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 tilde was originally one of a variety of marks written over an omitted letter or several letters as a scribal abbreviation (a "mark of contraction").[2] Thus, the commonly used words Anno Domini were frequently abbreviated to Ao Dñi, with an elevated terminal with a contraction mark placed over the "n". Such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the scribe's labor and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with contraction marks and other abbreviations; only uncommon words were given in full.
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:
On typewriters designed for languages that routinely use diacritics (accent marks), there are two possible solutions. Keys can be dedicated to precomposed characters or alternatively a dead key mechanism can be provided. With the latter, a mark is made when a dead key is typed, but unlike normal keys, the paper carriage does not move on and thus the next letter to be typed is printed under that accent. Typewriters for Spanish typically have a dedicated key for Ñ/ñ but, as Portuguese uses Ã/ã and Õ/õ, a single dead-key (rather than take two keys to dedicate) is the most practical solution.
The tilde symbol did not exist independently as a movable type or hot-lead printing character since the type cases for Spanish or Portuguese would include sorts for the accented forms.
| align=right | Serif: | —~— | - | align=right | Sans-serif: | —~— | - | align=right | Monospace: | —~— | - | A free-standing tilde between two em dashes in three font families |
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.[4]
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.
See main article: Ñ. As indicated by the etymological origin of the word "tilde" in English, this symbol has been closely associated with the Spanish language. The connection stems from the use of the tilde above the letter (n) to form the (different) letter (ñ) in Spanish, a feature shared by only a few other languages, most of which are historically connected to Spanish. This peculiarity can help non-native speakers quickly identify a text as being written in Spanish with little chance of error. Particularly during the 1990s, Spanish-speaking intellectuals and news outlets demonstrated support for the language and the culture by defending this letter against globalisation and computerisation trends that threatened to remove it from keyboards and other standardised products and codes.[5] [6] The Instituto Cervantes, founded by Spain's government to promote the Spanish language internationally, chose as its logo a highly stylised with a large tilde. The 24-hour news channel CNN in the US later adopted a similar strategy on its existing logo for the launch of its Spanish-language version, therefore being written as CN͠N. And similarly to the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Spain men's national basketball team is nicknamed "ÑBA".
In Spanish itself the word Spanish; Castilian: tilde is used more generally for diacritics, including the stress-marking acute accent.[7] The diacritic is more commonly called Spanish; Castilian: virgulilla or Spanish; Castilian: la tilde de la eñe, and is not considered an accent mark in Spanish, but rather simply a part of the letter (much like the dot over makes an character that is familiar to readers of English).
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.
In more recent digital usage, tildes on either side of a word or phrase have sometimes come to convey a particular tone that "let[s] the enclosed words perform both sincerity and irony", which can pre-emptively defuse a negative reaction.[12] For example, BuzzFeed 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.[13] It may also be used online, especially in informal writing such as fanfiction, to convey a cutesy, playful, or flirtatious tone.[14]
In some languages, the tilde is a diacritic mark placed over a letter to indicate a change in its pronunciation:
The tilde was firstly used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, as a variant of the circumflex, representing a rise in pitch followed by a return to standard pitch.
Later, it was used to make abbreviations in medieval Latin documents. When an or followed a vowel, it was often omitted, and a tilde (physically, a small) was placed over the preceding vowel to indicate the missing letter; this is the origin of the use of tilde to indicate nasalization (compare the development of the umlaut as an abbreviation of .) The practice of using the tilde over a vowel to indicate omission of an or continued in printed books in French as a means of reducing text length until the 17th century. It was also used in Portuguese and Spanish.
The tilde was also used occasionally to make other abbreviations, such as over the letter, making, to signify the word que ("that").
It is also as a small that the tilde originated when written above other letters, marking a Latin which had been elided in old Galician-Portuguese. In modern Portuguese it indicates nasalization of the base vowel: Portuguese: mão "hand", from Lat. manu-; Portuguese: razões "reasons", from Lat. Latin: rationes. This usage has been adopted in the orthographies of several native languages of South America, such as Guarani and Nheengatu, as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and many other phonetic alphabets. For example, pronounced as /[ljɔ̃]/ is the IPA transcription of the pronunciation of the French place-name Lyon.
In Breton, 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 pronounced as /[ãn]/ whereas gives pronounced as /[ã]/.
In the DMG romanization of Tunisian Arabic, the tilde is used for nasal vowels õ and ṏ.
See main article: Ñ. The tilded developed from the digraph in Spanish. In this language, is considered a separate letter called eñe (pronounced as /es/), rather than a letter-diacritic combination; it is placed in Spanish dictionaries between the letters and . In Spanish, the word tilde actually refers to diacritics in general, e.g. the acute accent in José,[15] while the diacritic in is called "virgulilla" (pronounced as /es/) (yeísta) or (pronounced as /es/) (non-yeísta). [16] Current languages in which the tilded is used for the palatal nasal consonant pronounced as //ɲ// include
In Vietnamese, a tilde over a vowel represents a creaky rising tone (ngã). Letters with the tilde are not considered separate letters of the Vietnamese alphabet.
In phonetics, a tilde is used as a diacritic that is placed above a letter, below it or superimposed onto the middle of it:
A tilde between two phonemes indicates optionality, or "alternates with". E.g. (IPA|ɕ ~ ʃ) 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 Estonian, the symbol stands for the close-mid back unrounded vowel, and it is considered an independent letter.
In modern internet slang, the tilde can be used to signify endearment or love, i.e. "Hello master~". It is commonly used in the furry and femboy communities and can also be used as a diminutive, akin to adding the "ee" sound to the end of a word.
Some languages and alphabets use the tilde for other purposes, such as:
The tilde is used in various ways in punctuation, including:
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 numbers, 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 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, but only to denote ranges of numbers (e.g., French: « 21~32 degrés Celsius »" means "21 to 32 degrees Celsius")
(The symbol (a double tilde) is also used in French, for example, French: « ≈400 mètres » means "approximately 400 meters".)
See also: Approximation. Before a number the tilde can mean 'approximately'; '~42' means 'approximately 42'.[20] When used with currency symbols that precede the number (national conventions differ), the tilde precedes the symbol, thus for example '~$10' means 'about ten dollars'.[21]
The symbols ≈ (almost equal to) and ≅ (approximately equal to) are among the other symbols used to express approximation.
The is used for various purposes in Japanese, including to denote ranges of numbers (e.g., 5〜10 means between 5 and 10) in place of dashes or brackets, and to indicate origin. The wave dash is also used to separate a title and a subtitle in the same line, as a colon is used in English.
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 practice the (Unicode), is often used instead of the (Unicode), because the Shift JIS code for the wave dash, 0x8160, which should be mapped to U+301C,[22] [23] is instead mapped to U+FF5E[24] in Windows code page 932 (Microsoft's code page for Japanese), a widely used extension of Shift JIS.
This decision avoided a shape definition error in the original (6.2) Unicode code charts:[25] the wave dash reference glyph in JIS / Shift JIS[26] [27] matches the Unicode reference glyph for U+FF5E,[28] 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,[29] [30] while IBM and Apple map it to U+301C.[31] [32] [33] 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 fonts, reducing the confusion and incompatibility.
A tilde in front of a single quantity can mean "approximately", "about"[34] or "of the same order of magnitude as."
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.
In mathematics, the tilde operator (which can be represented by a tilde or the dedicated character), sometimes called "twiddle", is often used to denote an equivalence relation between two objects. Thus "" means " is equivalent to ". It is a weaker statement than stating that equals . The expression "" is sometimes read aloud as " twiddles ", perhaps as an analogue to the verbal expression of "".[35]
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
\limx
| f(x) | |
| g(x) |
=1
A tilde is also used to indicate "approximately 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. X ~ B(n,p) 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
(x,y)
x
y
x\simy
The symbol "
\tilde{f}
A tilde placed below a letter in mathematics can represent a vector quantity (e.g.
(x1,x2,x3,\ldots,xn)=\underset{\sim}{x}
In statistics and probability theory, a tilde placed on top of a variable is sometimes used to represent the median of that variable; thus
\tilde{y}
y
\tilde{n}
In machine learning, a tilde may represent a candidate value for a cell state in GRUs or LSTM units. (e.g. c̃)
Often in physics, one can consider an equilibrium solution to an equation, and then a perturbation to that equilibrium. For the variables in the original equation (for instance
X
X\tox+\tilde{x}
x
\tilde{x}
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
\boldsymbol{\omega}\inR3
\tilde{\boldsymbol{\omega}}=\begin{bmatrix}0&-\omega3&\omega2\ \omega3&0&-\omega1\ -\omega2&\omega1&0\end{bmatrix}
For relations involving preference, economists sometimes use the tilde to represent indifference between two or more bundles of goods. For example, to say that a consumer is indifferent between bundles x and y, an economist would write x ~ y.
It can approximate the sine wave symbol (∿, U+223F), which is used in electronics to indicate alternating current, in place of +, −, or ⎓ for direct current.
The tilde may indicate alternating allomorphs or morphological alternation, as in pronounced as ///ˈniː~ɛl+t/// for kneel~knelt (the plus sign '+' indicates a morpheme boundary).[40] [41]
The tilde may represent some sort of phonetic or phonemic variation between two sounds, which might be allophones or in free variation. For example, pronounced as /[χ ~ x]/ can represent "either pronounced as /[χ]/ or pronounced as /[x]/".
In formal semantics, it is also used as a notation for the squiggle operator which plays a key role in many theories of focus.[42]
Computer programmers use the tilde in various ways and sometimes call the symbol (as opposed to the diacritic) a squiggle, squiggly, swiggle, or twiddle. According to the Jargon File, other synonyms sometimes used in programming include not, approx, wiggle, enyay (after eñe) and (humorously) sqiggle .[43]
On Unix-like operating systems (including AIX, BSD, Linux and macOS), tilde normally indicates the current user's home directory. For example, if the current user's home directory is, then the command is equivalent to,, or . This convention derives from the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A terminal in common use during the 1970s, which happened to have the tilde symbol and the word "Home" (for moving the cursor to the upper left) on the same key. When prepended to a particular username, the tilde indicates that user's home directory (e.g., for the home directory of user, such as).[44]
Used in URLs on the World Wide Web, it often denotes a personal website on a Unix-based server. For example,