Later, it was used to make abbreviations in medieval Latin documents. AbbreviationĬarta marina showing Finnish economy, with the captions Hic fabricantur naves and Hic fabricantur bombarde abbreviated It was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, as a variant of the circumflex, representing a rise in pitch followed by a return to standard pitch. In some languages, the tilde is used as a diacritical mark ( ˜ ) placed over a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation, such as nasalization. Another approximation symbol is ≈, meaning "approximately equal to." Diacritical use It can mean "similar to", including "of the same order of magnitude as", such as "x ~ y" meaning that x and y are of the same order of magnitude. This symbol (in English) sometimes means "approximately", such as "~30 minutes ago" meaning "approximately 30 minutes ago". 4.2.1 Unicode and Shift JIS encoding of wave dash.Especially in lexicography the tilde as a separate character or swung dash ( ⁓) is used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word. And there are additional similar characters for different roles. These are encoded in Unicode at U+0303 ◌̃ combining tilde and U+007E ~ tilde (as a spacing character). It was originally written over a letter as a mark of abbreviation, but has since acquired a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics. The tilde ( / ˈ t ɪ l d ə /, / ˈ t ɪ l d i / ˜ or ~ ) is a grapheme with several uses.