tilde

noun

TIL-duh/ˈtɪldə/

Pluraltildes

9 meanings of tilde

Practice

1
nouncountable
A wavy mark shaped like ~, used in writing, math, and computer text.
Like a tiny wave drawn on the page.
She added a tilde between the two words as a quick squiggle.
Most keyboards hide the tilde up in the top corner.
Similarsquiggle, twiddle
Note
2
nouncountable
A small wavy mark (˜) written above a letter to change how the letter is said.
She forgot the tilde over the letter, so everyone said her name wrong.
Spanish and Portuguese both use tildes, but they put them over different letters.
Note
3
nouncountable
A wavy mark used before a number to mean 'about' or 'roughly'.
Like saying 'about' instead of giving an exact number.
She put a tilde in front of '30' to show the weight was approximate.
The menu listed a tilde before each price because the amounts were estimates.
Note
4
nouncountable
The keyboard character ~ stored as the number 126 in a computer's character set.
Like a name tag: each letter and symbol gets its own number inside the computer.
On older computers, the tilde was saved as the number 126.
You can type the tilde by entering its character code.
Note
5
nouncountable
A wavy mark used between two numbers to show a range, common in Asia.
Like a dash that says 'from here to there'.
The sign read '9~5', using a tilde to show the open hours.
In Japan, a tilde often joins two numbers to mean 'from one to the other'.
Note
6
nouncountable
In dictionaries, a wavy mark used to stand in for the word being explained.
Under “cold,” the entry shows “~ feet,” and the tilde there just means “cold.”
My grandpa's old word book has tildes all through it, and at first I didn't know what they meant.
7
nouncountable
In logic, a wavy mark put before a statement to mean 'not'.
Like putting 'not' in front of a sentence to say the opposite.
The student wrote a tilde before P to mean 'not P'.
A tilde in front of the statement flips it to the opposite.
Note

Less common meanings

8
noun
Another name for the Vietnamese tone mark dấu ngã, which is placed above a vowel to indicate a creaky rising tone (thanh ngã).
9
noun
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.

Practice

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Origin

From Spanish tilde, which came from Latin titulus meaning a superscript mark.