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A wavy horizontal stroke with several unrelated uses.
Also known as: Squiggle, Swung dash, Approximately sign
The tilde is a small wave with an unusual spread of jobs: an accent in Spanish and Portuguese, approximation in mathematics, and a home directory on a Unix system.
Marks nasalisation over a vowel in Portuguese, and distinguishes the letter enye in Spanish.
Contexts: Software
Means approximately when placed before a number.
Contexts: Mathematics
Stands for the current user's home directory on Unix-style systems.
Contexts: Software
Is separately encoded from the mathematical tilde operator, which occupies its own code point and is drawn a little longer and set at a different height. Mathematical text typed with the keyboard character is technically the wrong character and is universally understood, which is why the substitution is so widespread.
Contexts: Mathematics, Software
A short horizontal stroke with a single smooth wave in it, rising then falling, set at the height of the line or above it.
One is a punctuation mark and diacritic; the other is a mathematical operator with its own code point.