tilde
noun/ˈtɪldə/ · /ˈtɪldi/
Etymology Borrowed from Spanish tilde, from Latin titulus (“superscript”) or from tildar. Doublet of titer/titre, title, titlo, tittle, and titulus. Compare Portuguese til.
10 senses
- 1In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩ is a palatalized ⟨n⟩, for example in ⟨cañón⟩.
- 2In Portuguese, ⟨ã⟩ and ⟨õ⟩ are nasalized vowels, for…
- 3Another name for the Vietnamese tone mark dấu ngã, which…
- 4Another name for apex, a curved diacritic used in the…
- 5A symbol ⟨~⟩, with various names and uses, also known as…
- 6The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII…
- 7A punctuation mark that indicates range (from a number…
- 8In lexicography, the ⟨~⟩ symbol is used used to indicate…
- 9May be used to represent approximation, in English prose…
- 10An alternate form of the logical negation operator…
› A diacritical mark ⟨˜⟩ placed above a letter…
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:
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:
Another name for the Vietnamese tone mark dấu ngã, which is placed above a vowel to indicate a creaky rising tone (thanh ngã).
Another name for 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.
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.
- 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:
The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII character set, and later in the 1992 Unicode character set.
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.
In lexicography, the ⟨~⟩ symbol is used used to indicate the repetition of the topical word or item. In this case, the symbol is also called a swung dash.
May be used to represent approximation, in English prose and in mathematics. For example, “My dog weighs ~30 pounds.”
Human sciences, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy, Sciences An alternate form of the logical negation operator, which is usually written as ¬.
- Derived terms
- middle tilde, overtilde, undertilde, zilde
- Related terms
- ASCII, hyphen, swung dash, positioned in middle height of line, apex, ~