Tilde

A tilde is a diacritic mark (~) put over a letter (usually a vowel) to indicate nasalization. For example, in Portuguese, ã and õ are nasalized a and o. In Spanish, tilde over n (ñ) is a separate letter (called eñe) and is a palatal [n] (SAMPA J, IPA [ɲ]), pronounced like nh in Portuguese.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the tilde is used to mark nasalization, and is placed above any phone that is nasalized.

A similar symbol, written on the line (ASCII: 126, hex 7E), is used in logic as one way of representing negation: thus ~ p means it is not the case that p.

In Japanese, this symbol is used to indicate ranges. 12 ~ 15 means "12 to 15", ~ 3 means "up to three" and 100 ~ means "100 and greater".

See also punctuation, Õ, Special characters