It can be used as sign for baptism like the asterisk for birth.

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search - tilde wiki ...

Hit #1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde

Bringhurst has it as a swung dash, despite it being named asciitilde in a digital font. He says,

“A stock keyboard character used in mathematics as the sign of similarity (a ~ b) and lexicography as a sign of repetition. [...] Not to be confused with the tilde.”

Also... http://typophile.com/node/43305

It ain’t a tilde! A tilde is a diacritic.

Right. Not a tilde. That’s what I was thinking. I recognize it now as a mathematical symbol for similarity. In fact, I feel sort of dumb for not recognizing that without posting this post. I can also imagine it used as a symbol of repetition. Certainly not a hyphen, dash, or worst of all, a bullet. Thanks for answers.

In informal contexts I use it for approximately.

(If that’s wrong, I don’t wanna be right.)

similarity ~ approximately ~ roughly ~

Absolutely ~ certainly ~ definitely. You’re swinging that swung dash now!

Koppa:

You are right: it never was in the California case, nor in any other case that had a “codified” layout, for those cases had space for far fewer sorts than digital fonts have. In a good book typography shop, though, you’d have found that swung dash in a “pi case” or a “math case” or a “side sorts” case. & each of those cases would have had its own layout, devised for the particular shop. The Linotype guy or the hand comp would know where to go get them.

I doubt you will “stop the madness.” As people find cute little sorts like this one lurking in fonts, they’ll find ways to “decorate” work with them. Good luck.

powers

My favourite use of the swung dash:

:-O~~~

- Lex

It is used in some computer programming languages, which is why it not only occurs in the ASCII character set, and hence almost all fonts, but also appears on the keyboard along with ^

I often see the swung dash used in dictionaries to stand in for the entry word in an example text.

In Korean, the swung dash is called “mulgyeolpyo (물결표; wave mark)”, and it is part of the standard set of punctuation defined in the standard orthography. It is mainly used to indicate a range of values, much like the en dash is used in English.

1월 25일 ~ 2월 25일 (25 January – 25 February)

Less frequently, it is also used to stand in for part of a text which is missing. In the following example, the swung dash functions as a “blank” in a multiple-choice question.

우리는 ~를 탈 것이다.
1. 기차
2. 버스
3. 비행기

We will take ____.
1. the train
2. the bus
3. the plane

One of the frequent mistakes made by Koreans when writing in English (and I imagine other languages as well) is to use the swung dash as they are used to when writing Korean. It comes up all the time when I proofread English documents prepared by Koreans.

~ is handy for making things jump to the front of the cue in an alphabetical list for people who employ the AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Towing Co. filing method.

-=®=-

It isn’t too far off what we use to use for negation in symbolic logic. And when I was in school, one ~ was never used for “approximately equal.” That can be found in the Unicode mathematical symbols area. And even one of them isn’t the same as an ACII tilde (& so is - the same as equals? - is half of =, after all).

I suppose there is a term approximating “orthography” for symbols?

(BTW, I think the question should be about the character, not the glyph. The question about ~ would be the same, whether in Helvetica or Minion.)

My sympathies Koppa, it must be galling to see this usage spread if you dislike it so. I myself like the curve itself and often use it in my paintings. Mathematically it could be a sine or cosine curve which outlines one wavelength of a wave function in physics. William Hogarth championed the curve in his 1753 book “An Analysis of Beauty” a treatise to fix “the fluctuating ideas of Taste”. According to this theory, S-Shaped curved lines signify liveliness and activity and excite the attention of the viewer as contrasted with straight lines. Hogarth’s term Line of Beauty has recently cropped up as the title of a novel, and is also called the Curve of Beauty in metal smith work.

The Victorians had another alliterative compound-name for the S-curve that I once knew but have since forgotten- anybody recall that?

By the way, isn’t it possible that its use as a substitute dash may have started in California, considering the question-like intonation some natives there use to end their sentences ? ~ perfectly mimicked by, er, the glyph in question.

In some European linguistic texts its used to denote “vs.” or “cf.” or “relates to” between two linguistic examples (e.g. words; then usually set in italics) pretty loosly semantically, if you as me.

And of course in dictionaries instead of writing the word discussed again, as already noted above.

Though it seems to me, that dictionaries usually use a shorter “swung hyphen” sized sign, while those linguistic texts rather a longer “swung n-(or m) dash)”.

Lots of good info. Wow and thanks.

I stand corrected...I should have referred to it as a character, and not a glyph. (Transparently, I am more a typesetter than a typographer.)

As far as it being a pi character and not found in the CA job case...right. That comment wasn’t intended to disqualify the character completely...lots of the characters on our keyboards aren’t in that case...mostly the mathematical ones. Rereading my initial post, I can see how that may have been misunderstood. I was just trying to stir things up ~ have a little fun.

Also, am now wondering about the validity of it’s use to represent similarity, as Mr. Ellertson points out in his comments above.

Thanks again to all for contributing.

The ~ is commonly used in mathematics to mean “equivalent to” or “similar to” (see for example the wikipedia entry or olho’s comment above).

In some *nix system, the swung dash is used to denote the “home” folder of the current user, e.g. ~/myfile.txt.