## Encyclopedia > Tilde

Article Content

# 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

All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Search Encyclopedia
 Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!

Featured Article
 Stirling number ... is $E(X^n)=\sum_{k=1}^n S(n,k)\lambda^k.$ In particular, the nth moment of the Poisson distribution with expected value 1 is precisely the ...