tilde
Sign in to saveThe tilde (, also ) 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 in combination with a base letter. Its freestanding form is used in modern texts mainly to indicate approximation.
AI overview
The tilde (~) is a small curved symbol that can be combined with letters to change their sound or meaning, particularly in languages like Spanish, and its name comes from a Latin word meaning "title" or "superscription." When used on its own in modern writing, the tilde typically indicates that something is approximate or rough rather than exact.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Key facts
- Symbol.mark
- ~◌̃
- Symbol.name
- Tilde (symbol) Combining tilde (diacritic)
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
46 sectionsContents
- History
- Use by medieval scribes
- Role of mechanical typewriters
- The centralized ASCII tilde <span class="anchor" id="ASCII tilde (U+007E)"></span>
- Connection to Spanish
- Usage
- Common use in English<span class="anchor" id="Common use"></span>
- Diacritical use
- Pitch
- Abbreviation
- Nasalization
- Palatal n
- Tone
- International Phonetic Alphabet
- Letter extension
- Other uses
- Punctuation
- Approximation
- Japanese
- Chinese
- Mathematics
- As a unary operator
- As a relational operator
- As a diacritic
- Physics
- Economics
- Electronics
- Linguistics
- Computing
- Directories and URLs
- Computer languages
- Regex
- Negation
- ~~ cast
- Other uses
- Keyboards
- Backup filenames
- Microsoft filenames
- Juggling notation
- Unicode encoding <span class="anchor" id="Use with computers"></span>
- Letters with tilde <span class="anchor" id="Combining tilde"></span>
- Unicode and Shift JIS encoding of wave dash
- Combining double tilde
- See also
- Notes
- References
The tilde (, also ) 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 in combination with a base letter. Its freestanding form is used in modern texts mainly to indicate approximation.
== History == ===Use by medieval scribes=== 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"). 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.