Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word tilde. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word tilde, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say tilde in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word tilde you have here. The definition of the word tilde will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition oftilde, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
The tilde was used similarly in Portuguese on vowels to show that the letter bearing the tilde should be pronounced nasally.
Another name for the Vietnamese tone markdấu ngã, which is placed above a vowel to indicate a creaky rising tone (thanh ngã).
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.
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.
1992, Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style:
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.
The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII character set, and later in the 1992 Unicode character set.
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.
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.
May be used to represent approximation, in English prose and in mathematics. For example, “My dog weighs ~30 pounds.”
(logic) An alternate form of the logical negation operator, which is usually written as ¬.
Historical notes
In reference works from the 1950's and earlier (i.e., pre-ASCII), the second meaning of the word “tilde” is not attested. For example, in The Oxford English Dictionary (1933) and Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (1956), only the meaning of “tilde” as a diacritic is attested.
In the 1967 ASCII standard, the Tilde character was specified to look like a free-floating tilde diacritic (˜), and was intended to be used as a diacritic, by printing it over letters (using overprinting on a paper based computer terminal). In later years, the character was repurposed by users to serve as the symbol ⟨~⟩, and many fonts were changed to match this new de-facto definition. Hence, the word “tilde” entered English as a name for the ⟨~⟩ symbol.
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
“tilde”, in Kielitoimiston sanakirja [Dictionary of Contemporary Finnish] (in Finnish) (online dictionary, continuously updated), Kotimaisten kielten keskuksen verkkojulkaisuja 35, Helsinki: Kotimaisten kielten tutkimuskeskus (Institute for the Languages of Finland), 2004–, retrieved 2023-07-03
Deverbal from tildar or from Latintitulus, possibly through an Old Catalan or Old Provençal intermediate (accounting for the final -e instead of -o).[1]
In Spanish, the term tilde refers to a diacritic in general (including the tilde on top of ñ) but it is primarily used to designate the acute accent, as in á. The term virgulilla is used to specifically refer to the tilde on top of ñ.
