Tilde

Also called squiggle, twiddle, or swung dash.

How to type it

Left pinky with Shift.

Common uses

• Written over n, the tilde makes the Spanish letter ñ, as in año and mañana.
• In casual writing, a tilde before a number means approximately, as in ~50 people.

Less common uses

• In Unix shells, ~ stands for your home directory.
• Portuguese uses the tilde over vowels, as in the nasal sounds of pão and mãe.
• In many programming languages, ~ is the bitwise NOT operator.