Tilde
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A diacritical mark ⟨˜⟩ placed above a letter to modify its pronunciation.; 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 (¸)."
- 2 a diacritical mark (~) placed over the letter n in Spanish to indicate a palatal nasal sound or over a vowel in Portuguese to indicate nasalization wordnet
- 3 A diacritical mark ⟨˜⟩ placed above a letter to modify its pronunciation.; 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."
- 4 A diacritical mark ⟨˜⟩ placed above a letter to modify its pronunciation.; Another name for the Vietnamese tone mark dấu ngã, which is placed above a vowel to indicate a creaky rising tone (thanh ngã).
- 5 A diacritical mark ⟨˜⟩ placed above a letter to modify its pronunciation.; 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.
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- 6 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."
- 7 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.; The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII character set, and later in the 1992 Unicode character set.
- 8 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.; 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.
- 9 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.; 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.
- 10 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.; May be used to represent approximation, in English prose and in mathematics. For example, “My dog weighs ~30 pounds.”
- 11 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.; An alternate form of the logical negation operator, which is usually written as ¬.
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"The tilde is used in math to denote equivalence."
Etymology
Borrowed from Spanish tilde, from Latin titulus (“superscript”) or from tildar. Doublet of titer/titre, title, titlo, tittle, and titulus. Compare Portuguese til.
Related phrases
More for "tilde"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.