Tilde

This article is about the punctuation mark. For the given name, see Matilda (name).

The tilde (/ˈtɪldə/; ˜ or ~) is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin titulus, meaning "title" or "superscription".

The reason for the name was that it was originally written over a letter as a scribal abbreviation, as a "mark of suspension", shown as a straight line when used with capitals. Thus the commonly used words Anno Domini were frequently abbreviated to A^o Dñi, an elevated terminal with a suspension mark placed above the "n". Such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the scribe's labour and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with suspension marks; only uncommon words were given in full. The tilde has since been applied to a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. These are encoded in Unicode at U+0303 ◌̃ COMBINING TILDE and U+007E ~ TILDE (as a spacing character), and there are additional similar characters for different roles. In lexicography, the latter kind of tilde and the swung dash (⁓) are used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word.

Common use

This symbol (in English) informally means "approximately", such as: "~30 minutes before" meaning "approximately 30 minutes before". It can mean "similar to", including "of the same order of magnitude as", such as: "x ~ y" meaning that x and y are of the same order of magnitude. Another approximation symbol is the double-tilde ≈, meaning "approximately equal to" the critical difference being the subjective level of accuracy: ≈ indicates a value which can be considered functionally equivalent for a calculation within an acceptable degree of error, whereas ~ is usually used to indicate a larger, possibly significant, degree of error. The tilde is also used to indicate equal to, or approximately equal to by placing it over the "=" symbol, like this: ≅.

History

Use by medieval scribes

Text of Exeter Domesday Book of 1086

The text of the Domesday Book of 1086, relating for example, to the manor of Molland in Devonshire (see image left), is highly abbreviated as indicated by numerous tildes. The text with abbreviations expanded is as follows:

"Mollande tempore regis Edwardi geldabat pro iiii hidis et uno ferling. Terra est xl carucis. In dominio sunt iii carucae et x servi et xxx villani et xx bordarii cum xvi carucis. Ibi xii acrae prati et xv acrae silvae. Pastura iii leugae in longitudine et latitudine. Libras ad pensam. Huic manerio est adjuncta Blachepole. Elwardus tenebat tempore regis Edwardi pro manerio et geldabat pro dimidia hida. Terra est ii carucis. Ibi sunt v villani cum i servo. Valet xx solidos ad pensam et arsuram. Eidem manerio est injuste adjuncta Nimete et valet xv solidos. Ipsi manerio pertinet tercius denarius de Hundredis Nortmoltone et Badentone et Brantone et tercium animal pasturae morarum"

Role of mechanical typewriters

The incorporation of the tilde (~) into ASCII is a direct result of its appearance as a distinct character on mechanical typewriters in the late nineteenth century. When all character sets were pieces of metal permanently installed, and number of characters much more limited than in typography, the question of which languages and markets required which characters was an important one. Any good typewriter store had a catalog of alternative keyboards which could be specified for machines ordered from the factory.

At that time, the tilde was used as a character only on Spanish and Portuguese typewriters (keyboards). In modern Spanish, the tilde is used only with the n and N (ñ and Ñ). Both of these were conveniently assigned to a single mechanical typebar, sacrificing a key felt less important, usually the 1/2 - 1/4 key. Portuguese, however, while not using the ñ, uses the tilde on the vowels a and o. So as not to sacrifice two of the tightly limited keys to ã Ã õ Õ, the decision was made to make the ~ a separate "dead" character, in which the carriage holding the paper did not move. Dead keys, which had a notch cut out so as not to hit a mechanical linkage that triggered carriage movement, were used for characters that were intended to be combined (overstruck). On mechanical typewriters, Spanish keyboards (the first, or one of the first, "foreign" keyboards to be developed) had a dead key, which contained the acute accent ( ́), used over any vowel, and the dieresis (  ̈), used only over u. It was a simple matter to create a dead key for a Portuguese keyboard (created later than Spanish) to be overstruck with a and o, and thus the ~ was born as a typographical character, which did not exist previously as a type or hot-lead printing character. This was probably a product of the first and leading manufacturer of (mechanical) typewriters, Remington.

The tilde becomes a patriotic icon/glyph in Spain

The tilde has historically been associated with Spanish in popular consciousness, especially in the pre-digital (pre-computer) era. By far, the only way a lay reader would see the tilde used is over the n in common Spanish words such as mañana (tomorrow or morning), which has become a word in English, always tolerant of new words.

The Spanish alphabet presented some unique characteristics to challenge early computer designers. The Spanish language has, since the eighteenth century, been governed by a quasi-governmental agency, the Royal Spanish Academy, sometimes called the Academy of the Spanish Language. Made up of writers, professors, and the like, it is highly respected and without challenge to its authority, at least in Spain.

This learned body made decisions for linguistic and sometimes philosophical reasons. In an era in which all indexing was done (very slowly, and by today's standards very incompletely) by humans, it was not a conceptual challenge to declare that the "ch" constituted a single character (they called it "letter"), which came after "c" and before "d". In the same way, the "ll" came after "l" and before "m". The body decided something by no means obvious in its context: that the "ñ" was a distinct letter from the "n", which it followed. With the arrival of digital technology this quickly collapsed; the fiction that the ch and the "ll" are each one letter has been officially abandoned with little controversy.

The case was different with the "ñ". Since it was a key on mechanical Spanish keyboards, the decision was made to assign it a position in early character sets. Alphabetization was not addressed at the time, and remains an unresolved issue in Spain.

The "ñ" is only found on Spanish language keyboards. It is uniquely Spanish. How to alphabetize it (whether to treat it as an "n") is a uniquely Spanish problem. (In practice it has been abandoned, as we moved from looking words up in books to computer queries. Alphabetization is today - 2016 - a concern only of programmers, and they are not particularly interested in the philosophy of languages. The English of the original 128-character ASCII rules, under a veneer or Unicode inplementation.) Of the visible part of languages - their character sets - the "ñ" and only the "ñ" is uniquely Spanish. Therefore - and questions like this are taken seriously in Spain - it was a uniquely Spanish visible symbol. The Instituto Cervantes, another quasi-governmental body, chose it as its icon. The "n" and "ñ" differ only in the tilde, and Spanish writers are clear that it is the tilde, not the "ñ" of itself, that is being celebrated. The tilde is now discussed in newspaper articles, which us where Spain's thinkers communicate, and it is (newly) part of the nation's heritage. For further details see ñ.

Diacritical use

In some languages, the tilde is used as a diacritical mark ( ˜ ) placed over a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation, such as nasalization.

Pitch

It was first 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.

Abbreviation

Carta marina showing Finnish economy, with the captions Hic fabricantur naves and Hic fabricantur bDrqombarde abbreviated

Later, it was used to make abbreviations in medieval Latin documents. When an ⟨n⟩ or ⟨m⟩ followed a vowel, it was often omitted, and a tilde (i.e., a small ⟨n⟩) 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 ⟨e⟩.) The practice of using the tilde over a vowel to indicate omission of an ⟨n⟩ or ⟨m⟩ 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 ⟨q⟩ ("q̃") to signify the word que ("that").

Nasalization

It is also as a small ⟨n⟩ that the tilde originated when written above other letters, marking a Latin ⟨n⟩ which had been elided in old Galician-Portuguese. In modern Portuguese it indicates nasalization of the base vowel: mão "hand", from Lat. manu-; razões "reasons", from Lat. 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, [ljɔ̃] is the IPA transcription of the pronunciation of the French place-name Lyon.

In Breton, the symbol ⟨ñ⟩ after a vowel means that the letter ⟨n⟩ serves only to give the vowel a nasalised pronunciation, without being itself pronounced, as it normally is. For example, ⟨an⟩ gives the pronunciation [ãn] whereas ⟨añ⟩ gives [ã].

Palatal n

Main article: Ñ

The tilded ⟨n⟩ (⟨ñ⟩, ⟨Ñ⟩) developed from the digraph ⟨nn⟩ in Spanish. In this language, ⟨ñ⟩ is considered a separate letter called eñe (IPA: [ˈeɲe]), rather than a letter-diacritic combination; it is placed in Spanish dictionaries between the letters ⟨n⟩ and ⟨o⟩. As the word tilde can also refer to the most common diacritic in this language, e.g., the acute accent in José is also called a tilde in Spanish, the diacritic in ⟨ñ⟩ is called "virgulilla". Current languages in which the tilded ⟨n⟩ (⟨ñ⟩) is used for the palatal nasal consonant /ɲ/ include:

• Asturian
• Basque
• Chamorro language
• Filipino
• Galician
• Guaraní
• Mapudungun
• Papiamento
• Quechua
• Spanish
• Tetum

Tone

In Vietnamese, a tilde over a vowel represents a creaky rising tone (ngã).

International Phonetic Alphabet

In phonetics, a tilde is used as a diacritic either placed above a letter, below it or superimposed onto the middle of it (see International Phonetic Alphabet → Diacritics):

• A tilde above a letter indicates nasalization, e.g. [ã], [ṽ].
• A tilde superimposed onto the middle of a letter indicates velarization or pharyngealization, e.g. [ɫ], [z̴]. If no precomposed unicode character exists, the unicode character U+0334 ◌̴ COMBINING TILDE OVERLAY can be used to generate one.
• A tilde below a letter indicates laryngealisation, e.g. [d̰]. If no precomposed unicode character exists, the unicode character U+0330 ◌̰ COMBINING TILDE BELOW can be used to generate one.

Letter extension

In Estonian, the symbol ⟨õ⟩ stands for the close-mid back unrounded vowel, and it is considered an independent letter.

Other uses

Some languages and alphabets use the tilde for other purposes:

• Arabic script: A symbol resembling the tilde (maddah U+0653 ـٓ ARABIC MADDAH ABOVE) is used over the letter ⟨ا⟩ (/a/) to become ⟨آ⟩, denoting a long /aː/ sound ([ʔæː]).
• Guaraní: The tilded ⟨G̃⟩ (note that ⟨G/g⟩ with tilde is not available as a precomposed glyph in Unicode) stands for the velar nasal consonant. Also, the tilded ⟨y⟩ (⟨Ỹ⟩) stands for the nasalized upper central rounded vowel [ɨ̃]. A small number of other alphabets also use ⟨g̃⟩.

It has also been known as the 'Lieggly' in common slang terms. If one uses the tilde in any part of a sentence, then the writer of the sentence is lying. Example: I loved that show! Finished it~ The writer of that sentence was lying in saying they finished the aforementioned television show, because they used the tilde during the sentence. PLEASE NOTE: It is only a lieggly if the tilde is used purely for fun or effect.

• Unicode has a combining vertical tilde character,  ̾  (U+033E). It is used to indicate middle tone in linguistic transcription of certain dialects of the Lithuanian language and for transliteration of the Cyrillic palatalization sign,  ҄  (U+0484).

Precomposed Unicode characters

The following characters using the tilde as a diacritic exist as precomposed Unicode characters:

Character	Code point	Name
U+00C3	Ã	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE
U+00D1	Ñ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH TILDE
U+00D5	Õ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH TILDE
U+00E3	ã	LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH TILDE
U+00F1	ñ	LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE
U+00F5	õ	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE
U+0128	Ĩ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH TILDE
U+0129	ĩ	LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH TILDE
U+0168	Ũ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH TILDE
U+0169	ũ	LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH TILDE
U+019F	Ɵ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+022C	Ȭ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH TILDE AND MACRON
U+022D	ȭ	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE AND MACRON
U+026B	ɫ	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D6C	ᵬ	LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D6D	ᵭ	LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D6E	ᵮ	LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D6F	ᵯ	LATIN SMALL LETTER M WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D70	ᵰ	LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D71	ᵱ	LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D72	ᵲ	LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D73	ᵳ	LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH FISHHOOK AND MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D74	ᵴ	LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D75	ᵵ	LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1D76	ᵶ	LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH MIDDLE TILDE
U+1E1A	Ḛ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH TILDE BELOW
U+1E1B	ḛ	LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH TILDE BELOW
U+1E2C	Ḭ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH TILDE BELOW
U+1E2D	ḭ	LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH TILDE BELOW
U+1E4C	Ṍ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH TILDE AND ACUTE
U+1E4D	ṍ	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE AND ACUTE
U+1E4E	Ṏ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH TILDE AND DIAERESIS
U+1E4F	ṏ	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH TILDE AND DIAERESIS
U+1E74	Ṵ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH TILDE BELOW
U+1E75	ṵ	LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH TILDE BELOW
U+1E78	Ṹ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH TILDE AND ACUTE
U+1E79	ṹ	LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH TILDE AND ACUTE
U+1E7C	Ṽ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V WITH TILDE
U+1E7D	ṽ	LATIN SMALL LETTER V WITH TILDE
U+1EAA	Ẫ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND TILDE
U+1EAB	ẫ	LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND TILDE
U+1EB4	Ẵ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH BREVE AND TILDE
U+1EB5	ẵ	LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH BREVE AND TILDE
U+1EBC	Ẽ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH TILDE
U+1EBD	ẽ	LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH TILDE
U+1EC4	Ễ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND TILDE
U+1EC5	ễ	LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND TILDE
U+1ED6	Ỗ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND TILDE
U+1ED7	ỗ	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH CIRCUMFLEX AND TILDE
U+1EE0	Ỡ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH HORN AND TILDE
U+1EE1	ỡ	LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH HORN AND TILDE
U+1EEE	Ữ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U WITH HORN AND TILDE
U+1EEF	ữ	LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH HORN AND TILDE
U+1EF8	Ỹ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH TILDE
U+1EF9	ỹ	LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH TILDE
U+2C62	Ɫ	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE TILDE

Similar characters

There are a number of Unicode characters similar to the tilde.

Character	Code point	Name	Comments
~	U+007E	TILDE	Same as keyboard tilde. In-line.
˜	U+02DC	SMALL TILDE	Raised but quite small.
◌̃	U+0303	COMBINING TILDE
͊	U+034A	COMBINING NOT TILDE ABOVE	Raised, small, with slash through.
῀	U+0342	COMBINING GREEK PERISPOMENI	Used as an Ancient Greek accent under the name "circumflex"; it can also be written as an inverted breve.
◌̰	U+0330	COMBINING TILDE BELOW	Used in IPA to indicate creaky voice
◌̴	U+0334	COMBINING TILDE OVERLAY	Used in IPA to indicate velarization or pharyngealization
ס֘	U+0598	HEBREW ACCENT ZARQA	Hebrew cantillation mark
ס֮	U+05AE	HEBREW ACCENT ZINOR	Hebrew cantillation mark
◌᷉	U+1DC9	COMBINING ACUTE-GRAVE-ACUTE	Used in IPA as a tone mark
⁓	U+2053	SWUNG DASH
∼	U+223C	TILDE OPERATOR	Used in mathematics. In-line. Ends not curved as much.
∽	U+223D	REVERSED TILDE	In some fonts it is the tilde's simple mirror image; others extend the tips to resemble a ∞
∿	U+223F	SINE WAVE
≈	U+2248	ALMOST EQUAL TO or PARALILDE
〜	U+301C	WAVE DASH	Used in Japanese punctuation
〰	U+3030	WAVY DASH
﹋	U+FE4B	WAVY OVERLINE
﹏	U+FE4F	WAVY LOW LINE
～	U+FF5E	FULLWIDTH TILDE	50% wider. In-line. Ends not curved much.

ASCII tilde (U+007E)

Serif:	—~—
Sans-serif:	—~—
Monospace:	—~—
A tilde between two em dashes in three font families

Raised tilde from a dot matrix printer

Most modern proportional fonts align plain spacing tilde at the same level as dashes, or only slightly upper. This distinguishes it from a small tilde ( ˜ ), which is always raised. But in some monospace fonts, especially used in text user interfaces, ASCII tilde character is raised too. This apparently is a legacy of typewriters, where pairs of similar spacing and combining characters relied on one glyph. Even in line printers' age character repertoires were often not large enough to distinguish between plain tilde, small tilde and combining tilde. Overprinting of a letter by the tilde was a working method of combining a letter.

Punctuation

The swung dash (~) is used in various ways in punctuation:

Range

In some languages (though not English), a tilde-like wavy dash may be used as punctuation (instead of an unspaced hyphen or en-dash) between two numbers, to indicate a range rather than subtraction or a hyphenated number (such as a part number or model number).

Before a number the tilde is used to mean "approximately"; "~42" means "approximately 42". Japanese and other East Asian languages almost always use this convention, but it is often done for clarity in some other languages as well.

Chinese uses the wavy 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 type-set documents, as a wavy dash preceding a number sometimes represents an approximation (see the Mathematics section, below).

Japanese

Further information: Japanese punctuation

The wave dash (波ダッシュ, nami dasshu) is used for various purposes in Japanese, including to denote ranges of numbers, 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 chouon, katakana character, in Japanese, extending the final syllable.

Unicode and Shift JIS encoding of wave dash

Correct JIS wave dash.

Incorrect Unicode wave dash.

In practice the full-width tilde (全角チルダ, zenkaku chiruda), Unicode U+FF5E, is often used instead of the wave dash (波ダッシュ, nami dasshu), Unicode U+301C, because the Shift JIS code for the wave dash, 0x8160, which is supposed to be mapped to U+301C, is not mapped to U+301C but mapped to U+FF5E in code page 932 (Microsoft's code page for Japanese), a widely used extension of Shift JIS, in order to avoid the shape definition error in Unicode: the wave dash glyph in JIS/Shift JIS is identical to the Unicode reference glyph for U+FF5E, while the reference glyph for U+301C was incorrectly turned upside down when Unicode imported the JIS wave dash. In other platforms such as Mac OS and Mac OS X, 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.

Nevertheless, the Japanese wave dash is still formally mapped to U+301C as of JIS X 0213. Those two code points have the identical or very similar glyph in several fonts, reducing the confusion and incompatibility.

Mathematics

As a unary operator

A tilde in front of a single quantity can mean "approximately", "about" 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 has been replacing the tilde with the negation symbol (¬) for this purpose, to avoid confusion with equivalence relations.

As a binary operator

In the 1800s x ~ y was the 'difference' operator, and thus meant | x − y |, (the absolute value of x − y).

As a relational operator

In mathematics, the tilde operator (Unicode U+223C), sometimes called "twiddle", is often used to denote an equivalence relation between two objects. Thus "x ~ y" means "x is equivalent to y". It is a weaker statement than stating that x equals y. The expression "x ~ y" is sometimes read aloud as "x twiddles y", perhaps as an analogue to the verbal expression of "x = y".

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, f (x) ~ g(x) means that lim_{x → ∞} 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. h ~ 10⁻³⁴ J s) 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.

A tilde can also be used to represent geometric similarity (e.g. ∆ABC ~ ∆DEF, meaning triangle ABC is similar to DEF). A triple tilde (≋) is often used to show congruence, an equivalence relation in geometry.

As an accent

The symbol "$\tilde{f}$" is often pronounced "eff twiddle" or, particularly in American English, "eff wiggle". This can be used to denote the Fourier transform of f, or a lift of f, and can have a variety of other meanings depending on the context.

A tilde placed below a letter in mathematics can represent a vector quantity (e.g. $(x_1, x_2, x_3, \ldots, x_n) = \underset{^\sim}{\mathbf x}$).

In statistics and probability theory, a tilde placed on top of a variable is sometimes used to represent the median of that variable; thus $\tilde{\mathbf y}$ would indicate the median of the variable $\mathbf y$. A tilde over the letter n ($\tilde{n}$) is sometimes used to indicate the harmonic mean.

Physics

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 $X$) a substitution $X\to x+\tilde{x}$ can be made, where $x$ is the equilibrium part and $\tilde{x}$ is the perturbed part.

Economics

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.

Electronics

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.

Computing

Directories and URLs

On Unix-like operating systems (including AIX, BSD, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X), tilde normally indicates the current user's home directory: for example, if the current user's home directory is /home/bloggsj, then cd, cd ~, cd /home/bloggsj or cd $HOME are equivalent. 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., ~janedoe for the home directory of user janedoe, such as /home/janedoe).

Used in URLs on the World Wide Web, it often denotes a personal website on a Unix-based server. For example, http://www.example.com/~johndoe/ might be the personal web site 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 /home/username/public_html or /home/username/www.

In URLs, the characters %7E (or %7e) may substitute for tilde if an input device lacks a tilde key. Thus, http://www.example.com/~johndoe/ and http://www.example.com/%7Ejohndoe/ will behave in the same manner.

Computer languages

The tilde is used in the AWK programming language as part of the pattern match operators for regular expressions:

• variable ~ /regex/ returns true if the variable is matched.
• variable !~ /regex/ returns false if the variable is matched.

A variant of this, with the plain tilde replaced with =~, was adopted in Perl, and this semi-standardization has led to the use of these operators in other programming languages, such as Ruby or the SQL variant of the database PostgreSQL.

In APL and MATLAB, tilde represents the monadic logical function NOT.

In the C, C++ and C# programming languages, the tilde character is used as bitwise NOT operator, following the notation in logic (an ! causes a logical NOT, instead). In C++ and C#, the tilde is also used as the first character in a class's method name (where the rest of the name must be the same name as the class) to indicate a destructor – a special method which is called at the end of the object's life.

In the CSS stylesheet language, the tilde is used for the indirect adjacent combinator as part of a selector.

In the D programming language, the tilde is used as an array concatenation operator, as well as to indicate an object destructor and bitwise not operator. 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, what to do with "120" + "14" ? Is this a string "134" (addition of two numbers), or "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-safe even in the presence of covariance.

In the Groovy programming language the tilde character is used as an operator mapped to the bitwiseNegate() method. Given a String the method will produce a java.util.regex.Pattern. Given an integer it will negate the integer bitwise like in different C variants. =~ 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 programming language, the tilde is used to indicate a quotation mark inside a quoted string.

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. The url package also supports entering tildes directly, e.g., \url{http://server/~name}. In both text and math mode, a tilde on its own (~) renders a white space with no line breaking.

In MediaWiki syntax, four tildes are used as a shortcut for a user's signature.

In Common Lisp, the tilde is used as the prefix for format specifiers in format strings. In Max/MSP, a tilde is used to denote objects that process at the computer's sampling rate, i.e. mainly those that 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 Microsoft's SQL Server Transact-SQL (T-SQL) language, the tilde is a unary Bitwise NOT operator.

In JavaScript, the tilde is used as a unary bitwise complement (or bitwise negation) operation (~number). Because JavaScript internally uses floats and the bitwise complement only works on integers, numbers are stripped of their decimal part before applying the operation. This has also given rise to using two tildes ~~number as a shorthand for the mathematical floor function (numbers are stripped of their decimal part and changed into their complement, and then back. The net result is thus only the removal of the decimal part).

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.

Backup filenames

The dominant Unix convention for naming backup copies of files is appending a tilde to the original file name. It originated with the Emacs text editor and was adopted by many other editors and some command-line tools.

Emacs also introduced an elaborate numbered backup scheme, with files named filename.~1~, filename.~2~ and so on. It didn't catch on, probably because version control software does this better.

Microsoft filenames

The tilde was part of Microsoft's filename mangling scheme when it extended the FAT file system standard to support long filenames for Microsoft Windows. Programs written prior to this development could only access filenames in the so-called 8.3 format—the filenames consisted of a maximum of eight characters from a restricted character set (e.g. no spaces), followed by a period, followed by three more characters. In order to permit these legacy programs to access files in the FAT file system, each file had to be given two names—one long, more descriptive one, and one that conformed to the 8.3 format. This was accomplished with a name-mangling scheme in which the first six characters of the filename are followed by a tilde and a digit. For example, "Program Files" might become "PROGRA~1".

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.

Games

In many games, the tilde key (on U.S. English keyboards) is used to open the console. This is true for games such as Battlefield 3, Half-Life, Halo CE, Quake, Half-Life 2, Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, Unreal, Counter-Strike, Crysis, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, RuneScape, and others based on the Quake engine or Source engine.

It is sometimes used in Rogue-like games to represent water or snakes.

Other uses

Computer programmers use the tilde in various ways and sometimes call the symbol (as opposed to the diacritic) a squiggle, squiggly, or twiddle. According to the Jargon File, other synonyms sometimes used in programming include not, approx, wiggle, enyay (after eñe) and (humorously) sqiggle /ˈskɪɡəl/. It is used in many languages as a binary inversion operator, swapping a number's binary 1's and 0's for example ~10 (binary ~1010) is equal to 5 (binary 0101).

In Perl 6, "~~" is used instead of "=~".

Juggling notation

In the juggling notation system Beatmap, tilde can be added to either "hand" in a pair of fields to say "cross the arms with this hand on top". Mills Mess is thus represented as (~2x,1)(1,2x)(2x,~1)*.

Keyboards

Where a tilde is on the keyboard depends on the computer's language settings according to the following chart. On many keyboards it is primarily available through a dead key that makes it possible to produce a variety of precomposed characters with the diacritic. In that case, a single tilde can typically be inserted with the dead key followed by the space bar, or alternatively by striking the dead key twice in a row.

To insert a tilde with the dead key, it is often necessary to simultaneously hold down the Alt Gr key. On the keyboard layouts that include an Alt Gr key, it typically takes the place of the right-hand Alt key. With a Macintosh either of the Alt/Option keys function similarly.

In the US and European Windows systems, the Alt code for a single tilde is 126.

For Mac use option+'n' key

Keyboard	Insert a single tilde (~)	Insert a precomposed character with tilde (e.g. ã)
Arabic (Saudi)	⇧ Shift+`ذّ
Croatian	Alt Gr+1
Danish	Alt Gr+¨ followed by Space	Alt Gr+¨ followed by the relevant letter
Dvorak	Alt Gr+= followed by Space, or Alt Gr+⇧ Shift+' followed by Space	Alt Gr+= followed by the relevant letter, or Alt Gr+⇧ Shift+' followed by the relevant letter
English (Australia)	⇧ Shift+`
English (Canada)	⇧ Shift+`
English (UK)	⇧ Shift+#
English (US)	⇧ Shift+`	Ctrl+~ followed by the relevant letter
Faroese	Alt Gr+ð followed by Space	Alt Gr+ð followed by the relevant letter
Finnish	Alt Gr+¨ followed by Space, or Alt Gr+¨¨	Alt Gr+¨ followed by the relevant letter
French (Canada)	Alt Gr+ç followed by Space, or Alt Gr+çç	Alt Gr+ç followed by the relevant letter
French (France)	Alt Gr+é followed by Space, or Alt Gr+éé ⌥ Option+n (on Mac OS X)	Alt Gr+é followed by the relevant letter
French (Switzerland)	Alt Gr+^ followed by Space, or Alt Gr+^^	Alt Gr+^ followed by the relevant letter
German (Germany)	Alt Gr++
German (Switzerland)	Alt Gr+^ followed by Space, or Alt Gr+^^	Alt Gr+^ followed by the relevant letter
Hebrew (Israel)	⇧ Shift+~	Ctrl+⇧ Shift+~ followed by the relevant letter
Hindi (India)	Alt Gr+⇧ Shift+ the key to the left of 1
Hungarian	Alt Gr+1
Icelandic	Alt Gr+' (the same key as ?)
Italian	⌥ Option+5 (on Mac OS X) Alt Gr+ì (on Linux)
Norwegian	Alt Gr+¨ followed by Space, or Alt Gr+¨¨. On Mac: Ctrl+⌥ Option+¨, or ⌥ Option+¨ followed by Space.	Alt Gr+¨ followed by the relevant letter. On Mac: ⌥ Option+¨ followed by the relevant letter.
Polish	⇧ Shift+` followed by Space, or ⇧ Shift+``	The dead key is not generally used for inserting characters with tilde; when followed by {a|c|e|l|n|o|s|x|z}, it results in {ą|ć|ę|ł|ń|ó|ś|ź|ż} instead.
Portuguese	~ followed by Space	~ followed by the relevant letter
Slovak	Alt Gr+1
Spanish (Spain)	Alt Gr+4 followed by Space, or Alt Gr+44	Alt Gr+4 followed by the relevant letter
Spanish (Latin America)	Alt Gr++
Swedish	Alt Gr+¨ followed by Space, or Alt Gr+¨¨	Alt Gr+¨ followed by the relevant letter
Turkish	Alt Gr+ü followed by Space, or Alt Gr+üü	Alt Gr+ü followed by the relevant letter

See also

• Circumflex
• Tittle

External links

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