The keyboard tilde (~) that marks your Unix home folder and means ‘roughly,’ the small tilde ˜ and the combining mark that sits over ñ, ã, and õ, and the math tildes ∼ and ≈ it's endlessly confused with. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
The tilde (~, U+007E TILDE) is the wavy mark on your keyboard's top-left key, and it carries more jobs than almost any other punctuation character. In a Unix or Linux shell it's shorthand for your home directory (~/) — a convention traced to the 1970s Lear-Siegler ADM-3A terminal, whose keyboard printed ‘~’ and the word ‘Home’ on the same key. In casual chat it means ‘approximately’ or ‘around’ (~5 minutes), and programmers nickname it the ‘twiddle.’ Its name comes from Spanish tilde, from Latin titulus (‘title’ or ‘superscription’), and its story begins with medieval scribes: a small wavy mark written above a letter stood for an omitted ‘n’ or ‘m,’ saving costly vellum and ink. That shortcut is exactly why Spanish has ñ — scribes wrote a single ‘n’ with the mark over it to stand for a doubled ‘nn.’ That diacritic survives today as the combining tilde (◌̃, U+0303), a different character from the standalone small tilde (˜, U+02DC) and from the plain keyboard ~. It's also routinely confused with the math signs it resembles: the tilde operator ∼ (U+223C, ‘similar to’) and almost-equal ≈ (U+2248) are separate Unicode characters, not the ASCII tilde.
Three separate Unicode characters people all call ‘the tilde’ — the keyboard key, a standalone spacing modifier, and the combining diacritic that sits over a letter.
The combining tilde in action. Spanish ñ and Portuguese ã and õ are the everyday survivors of the scribe's shorthand for an omitted ‘n.’
In equations the tilde means ‘similar to’ or ‘approximately,’ but the true math signs are their own Unicode characters — not the ASCII ~ people usually type in their place.
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Approximately-equal, similar-to, and the operators and relations that fill out an equation alongside the tilde.
The combining tilde over ñ and ã, plus acutes, graves, umlauts, and the other marks that sit on a letter.