tilde
/ˈtɪldə/ noun
Forms tildes
- noun In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩ is a palatalized ⟨n⟩, for example in ⟨cañón⟩.
- noun In Portuguese, ⟨ã⟩ and ⟨õ⟩ are nasalized vowels, for example in ⟨canção⟩.
- noun The Vietnamese tone mark dấu ngã, which is placed above a vowel to indicate a creaky rising tone (thanh ngã).
- noun 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.
- noun 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.
- noun The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII character set, and later in the 1992 Unicode character set.
- noun 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.
- noun 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.
Etymology
Borrowed from Spanish tilde, from Latin titulus (“superscript”) or from tildar. Doublet of titer/titre, title, titlo, tittle, and titulus. Compare Portuguese til.
Webster’s 1913
- noun The accentual mark placed over n, and sometimes over l, in Spanish words [thus, ñ, l], indicating that, in pronunciation, the sound of the following vowel is to be preceded by that of the initial, or consonantal, y.
Etymology [Sp., fr. L. titulus a superscription, title, token, sign. See Title, n.]
Sources: Wiktionary · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “tilde”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details