Tilde

The tilde (~) at ASCII code 126 sits just before DEL (127) at the top of the printable range. As a diacritical mark, it indicates nasalization: Spanish "n" (with tilde) produces the /ny/ sound in "manana," and Portuguese uses it on vowels like "a" (with tilde) and "o" (with tilde).

In computing, tilde serves many roles: Unix home directory shortcut (~/Documents), bitwise NOT operator in C/JavaScript, approximate equality in math (~=), and destructors in C++ (~ClassName). Pre-composed tilde letters are available in ISO-8859-1 and can be entered via ALT codes on Windows. See the full set of tilde characters or browse HTML entity codes like ñ.