tilde

noun

1. The 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.
2. A symbol ⟨~⟩, with various names and uses, also known as swung dash or wave dash. In the computer industry, various other names may be used, such as squiggle and twiddle.
3. The character encoded as decimal 126 in the 1967 ASCII character set, and later in the 1992 Unicode character set.
4. A punctuation mark that indicates range (from a number to another number). This use is common in Asia, where the symbol in this case is also called a wave dash.
5. In lexicography, the ⟨~⟩ symbol is used used to indicate the repetition of the topical word or item. In this case, the symbol is also called a swung dash.
6. May be used to represent approximation, in English prose and in mathematics. For example, “My dog weighs ~30 pounds.”
7. An alternate form of the logical negation operator, which is usually written as ¬.