Tilde

If used in Web addresses (URLs), the tilde character (~) should be encoded (as %7e or %7E). In the long-standing RFC on URL format, RFC , there was an explicit requirement that any occurrence of the tilde (~) character in a Web page address (URL, a.k.a. For a short summary of.
Table of contents

Ibi duodecim acrae prati et quindecim acrae silvae. Pastura tres leugae in longitudine et latitudine. Huic manerio est adjuncta Blachepole. Elwardus tenebat tempore regis Edwardi pro manerio et geldabat pro dimidia hida. Terra est duae carucae. Ibi sunt quinque villani cum uno servo. Valet viginti solidos ad pensam et arsuram. Eidem manerio est injuste adjuncta Nimete et valet quindecim solidos. Ipsi manerio pertinet tercius denarius de Hundredis Nortmoltone et Badentone et Brantone et tercium animal pasturae morarum.

When all character sets were pieces of metal permanently installed, and number of characters much more limited than in typography , the question of which languages and markets required which characters was an important one. Any good typewriter store had a catalog of alternative keyboards that could be specified for machines ordered from the factory.

At that time, the tilde was used only in Spanish and Portuguese typewriters keyboards. In Modern Spanish, the tilde is used only with n and N.

Our translator supports a wide range of languages, both large and small

It uses the tilde on the vowels a and o. Dead keys , which had a notch cut out to avoid hitting a mechanical linkage that triggered carriage movement, were used for characters that were intended to be combined overstruck. That was probably a product of the first and leading manufacturer of mechanical typewriters, Remington.

As indicated by the etymological origin of the word "tilde" in English, this symbol has been closely associated with the Spanish language. This peculiarity can help non-native speakers quickly identify a text as being written in Spanish with little chance of error. Particularly during the s, Spanish-speaking intellectuals and news outlets demonstrated support for the language and the culture by defending this letter against globalisation and computerisation trends that threatened to remove it from keyboards and other standardised products and codes.

The hour news channel CNN in the US later adopted a similar strategy on its existing logo for the launch of its Spanish-language version. Confusingly, in Spanish itself the word tilde is used more generally for diacritics, including the stress-marking acute accent. 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.

Sign up, it's free!

Later, it was used to make abbreviations in medieval Latin documents. It was also used in Portuguese , and Spanish. In modern Portuguese it indicates nasalization of the base vowel: This usage has been adopted in the orthographies of several native languages of South America , such as Guarani and Nheengatu , as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet IPA and many other phonetic alphabets.

In Spanish the word tilde can refer to diacritics in general, e. In phonetics , a tilde is used as a diacritic that is placed above a letter, below it or superimposed onto the middle of it:. The following letters using the tilde as a diacritic exist as precomposed or combining Unicode characters:.

There are many Unicode characters for tildes, symbols incorporating tildes, and characters visually similar to a tilde:.

tilde - Wiktionary

Most modern proportional fonts align plain spacing tilde at the same level as dashes , or only slightly upper. But in some monospace fonts , especially used in text user interfaces , ASCII tilde character is raised too. This apparently is a legacy of typewriters , where pairs of similar spacing and combining characters relied on one glyph.

Even in line printers ' age character repertoires were often not large enough to distinguish between plain tilde, small tilde and combining tilde. Overprinting of a letter by the tilde was a working method of combining a letter. In some languages though not generally in English , [ citation needed ] a tilde-like wavy dash may be used as punctuation instead of an unspaced hyphen , en dash or em dash between two numbers , to indicate a range rather than subtraction or a hyphenated number such as a part number or model number.

Japanese and other East Asian languages almost always use this convention, but it is often done for clarity in some other languages as well. Chinese uses the wavy dash and full-width em dash interchangeably for this purpose. In English, the tilde is often used to express ranges and model numbers in electronics , but rarely in formal grammar or in type-set documents, as a wavy dash preceding a number sometimes represents an approximation see below. The wave dash is also used to separate a title and a subtitle in the same line, as a colon is used in English.


  • tilde - Dictionary Definition : leondumoulin.nl.
  • Nano/Microscale Heat Transfer (McGraw-Hill Nanoscience and Technology);
  • Tilde - Wikipedia.
  • Victorian Literature and Finance?
  • The reasons.
  • Language technologies for a connected world.
  • A Story About Adoption: Meant To Love You!

When used in conversations via email or instant messenger it may be used as a sarcasm mark. The sign is used as a replacement for the chouon , katakana character, in Japanese, extending the final syllable. This avoided a shape definition error in the Unicode code charts: A tilde in front of a single quantity can mean "approximately", "about" or "of the same order of magnitude as.

In written mathematical logic , the tilde represents negation: It is a weaker statement than stating that x equals y.

What the specifications say

The tilde can indicate approximate equality in a variety of ways. It can be used to denote the asymptotic equality of two functions. A tilde is also used to indicate " approximately equal to" e. In statistics and probability theory , the tilde means "is distributed as"; [4] see random variable.

A tilde can also be used to represent geometric similarity e. A tilde placed below a letter in mathematics can represent a vector quantity e. Often in physics, one can consider an equilibrium solution to an equation, and then a perturbation to that equilibrium.

Why tilde (~) should not be used in Web addresses (URLs)

A tilde is also used in particle physics to denote the hypothetical supersymmetric partner. For relations involving preference, economists sometimes use the tilde to represent indifference between two or more bundles of goods. This convention derives from the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A terminal in common use during the s, which happened to have the tilde symbol and the word "Home" for moving the cursor to the upper left on the same key. This mimics the Unix shell usage of the tilde.

The tilde is used in the AWK programming language as part of the pattern match operators for regular expressions:. In the CSS stylesheet language, the tilde is used for the indirect adjacent combinator as part of a selector. In the D programming language , the tilde is used as an array concatenation operator, as well as to indicate an object destructor and bitwise not operator.

Tilde operator can be overloaded for user types, and binary tilde operator is mostly used to merging two objects, or adding some objects to set of objects. It was introduced because plus operator can have different meaning in many situations. Is this a string "" addition of two numbers , or "" concatenation of strings or something else? In Eiffel , the tilde is used for object comparison. Unlike the call a. In the Apache Groovy programming language the tilde character is used as an operator mapped to the bitwiseNegate method. Given an integer it will negate the integer bitwise like in different C variants.

In Haskell , the tilde is used in type constraints to indicate type equality. In the Inform programming language, the tilde is used to indicate a quotation mark inside a quoted string. In "text mode" of the LaTeX typesetting language a tilde diacritic can be obtained using, e. In "math mode" a tilde diacritic can be written as, e.

The url package also supports entering tildes directly, e. The keyboard problems are partly caused by the fact that tilde is among the Ascii characters which w hich can be, and often have been, replaced by national letters in national variants of Ascii. In addition to keyboard problems, this may cause incorrect presentations on screen or paper especially when old devices and software are used.

Since it looks cryptic, it can easily be misread, misremembered, or mistyped. In my site logs I have noticed an increase in errors due to the mistyping of the tilde: The one time I gave the "escaped" URL to a newspaper, it was garbled as badly as the tilde version. As regards to experiences with newspapers, I once sent an article to the leading Finnish newspaper and mentioned the URL http: But we have to ask what causes the whole problem in the first place.

More exactly, this is a convention applied in many but not all Unix shells, or command interpreters; it does not work universally even in the Unix universe. There is hardly any explainable reason why such a convention was ever adopted. There is definitely nothing intuitive about it. Typically, it really refers to a subdirectory of the user's home directory.

People have really got confused with this. For example, consider an old URL of this document when written in the notation with an unencoded tilde in it: It's really a matter of configuring Web servers properly. People who are responsible for such things should make them map URLs into file names in a manner which makes tildes in URLs unnecessary. Typically, references to people's pages should be something like http: Notice however that having several options there may cause problems, since people and programs may not realize that they are synonymous. Personally, I think u is just fine: On small servers, one might even consider a mapping scheme where the personal page URLs are of the form http: To conclude, I strongly recommend escaping tildes in URLs asking your webmaster to support referring to personal Web pages with notations which do not require the tilde character in any form naturally as an alternative to the tilde form if it is already in use at the host setting things up so that tilde is not needed at all in URLs, when installing a Web server.

Date of last update: Technical corrections , ,