tilde

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tilde

  • /ˈtɪldə/
  • /ˈtɪldi/

Rhymes with -ɪldə

Where it comes from

Borrowed from Spanish tilde, from Latin titulus (“superscript”) or from tildar. Doublet of titer/titre, title, titlo, tittle, and titulus. Compare Portuguese til.

noun tildes

  1. 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. 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.
  3. The Vietnamese tone mark dấu ngã, which is placed above a vowel to indicate a creaky rising tone (thanh ngã).
  4. The 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.
  5. 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
  6. The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII character set, and later in the 1992 Unicode character set.
  7. 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.
  8. In lexicography, the ⟨~⟩ symbol is used to indicate the repetition of the topical word or item. In this case, the symbol is also called a swung dash.
  9. May be used to represent approximation, in English prose and in mathematics. For example, “My dog weighs ~30 pounds.”
  10. An alternate form of the logical negation operator, which is usually written as ¬.

Translations

Every language

noun diacritical mark

Españoltilde, virgulilla
한국어물결표 mulgyeolpyo
日本語チルダ chiruda
中文∼, ~, 波浪號 /波浪号 bōlànghào, 波浪符 bōlàngfú, 波形號 /波形号 bōxínghào
Portuguêstil
Françaistilde
DeutschSchlangenlinie, Tilde
Italianotilde
Ελληνικάπερισπωμένη perispoméni
Românătildă
Русскийти́льда tílʹda
Tiếng Việtdấu mềm
العربيةتِلْدَة tilda
עבריתגַּל gál, זַרְקָא zarqá

noun tone mark

Tiếng Việtdấu ngã

noun character

Españoltilde
Portuguêstil
DeutschTilde
Ελληνικάπερισπωμένη perispoméni
Русскийти́льда tílʹda
Tiếng Việtdấu sóng

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Cite this
MLA

"tilde." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/tilde. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026.

APA

tilde. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/tilde

Chicago

"tilde." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/tilde.

BibTeX
@misc{tilde_2026,
  title = {tilde},
  howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://micwyn.com/word/tilde},
  urldate = {2026-11-06}
}