TILDE
What It Means
Tilde refers to the mark ~ placed especially over the letter n (as in the Spanish señor, meaning “sir”) to denote the sound \nʸ\, or over vowels (as in the Portuguese irmã, meaning “sister”) to indicate nasality. When a tilde appears as an independent character, it usually means “approximately” (as in “we’ll be there in ~ 30 minutes”).
// A familiar example of the tilde appears in the name of Brazil’s capital city, São Paulo.
Tilde in Context
“Californians with accents, tildes and other diacritical marks in their names will soon be able to have their vital records accurately reflect their names.” — Linh Tat, Orange County (California) Register, 30 Dec. 2025
Did You Know?
The terms piña colada and La Niña share more than just a “cool” factor: both are Spanish loan words whose spellings include tildes, those wavy marks which in these examples are placed over the letter n to indicate a blend of the sounds of n and y. Tilde is itself a Spanish borrowing rooted in the Latin titulus, an ancestor of the English words title and titular that means “title” or “inscription.” The Spanish and English applications of tilde are distinct. In Spanish, tilde refers most commonly to the accent symbol, while ñ is its own member of the alphabet (pronounced “EN-yay”). In contrast, English speakers use tilde specifically for the aforementioned mark. In addition to functioning as a diacritic—that is, a mark paired with a character to indicate pronunciation—the tilde may be used as an independent character to indicate approximation, negation in logic, or similarity in mathematics.
