Tilde (~)

How to read it

Unicode names the keyboard character TILDE (U+007E). As an accent, the American Heritage Dictionary describes it over the letter n in Spanish, for the “ny” sound in cañón (canyon), and over a and o in Portuguese to show a nasal vowel, as in pão (bread). Vocabulary.com gives the everyday use before a number: the tilde says the number is approximate. In mathematics, Dictionary.com defines ∼ as a sign of equivalence or similarity between two values, and in logic as a sign of negation; Unicode’s separate mathematical character, TILDE OPERATOR (∼, U+223C), lists “varies with (proportional to)”, “difference between”, “similar to” and “not”. “Approximately equal to” has its own sign, the double wavy line ≈. In computing, the GNU Bash manual says a word that begins with ~ has the tilde replaced by the user’s home directory, and ~ followed by a login name by that user’s home directory.

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In Spanish, a tilde is any accent mark

The Real Academia Española’s dictionary gives “tilde” two main senses. The first is the written accent: “Raúl se escribe con tilde en la u” (Raúl is written with a tilde on the u). The second is the small stroke, sometimes wavy, that forms part of letters such as ñ, also called the virgulilla. A Spanish speaker may therefore call the stroke on the ú of Raúl a tilde, where English keeps the word for the wavy mark.

Look-alikes

Unicode cross-refers ~ to several similar wavy characters, each separate: the small tilde ˜ (U+02DC), the swung dash ⁓ (U+2053), the tilde operator ∼ (U+223C), the wave dash 〜 (U+301C) and the fullwidth tilde ～ (U+FF5E). Dictionary.com lists “swung dash” as one meaning of tilde.