page_title: Tilde
section_title: ASCII tilde (U+007E)
hierarchical_section_title: Tilde / ASCII tilde (U+007E)
caption_attribution_description: English: This sample of dot printer output also features a now obsolete ASCII typeface also found somewhere in text mode: U+007C (|) is rendered as ¦ and U+007E (~) is raised.
context_page_description: The tilde, ˜ or ~, is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish and from Portuguese, which in turn came from the Latin titulus, meaning "title" or "superscription".
  The reason for the name was that it was originally written over an omitted letter or several letters as a scribal abbreviation, or "mark of suspension" and "mark of contraction", shown as a straight line when used with capitals. Thus, the commonly used words Anno Domini were frequently abbreviated to Aᵒ Dñi, with an elevated terminal with a suspension mark placed over the "n". Such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the scribe's labour and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with suspension marks and other abbreviations; only uncommon words were given in full.
  The tilde has since been applied to a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right.
context_section_description: Most modern proportional fonts align the plain ASCII spacing tilde at the same level as dashes, or only slightly upper. This distinguishes it from the small tilde ( ˜ ) introduced with Windows-1252, which is always raised. 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.
caption: Raised tilde from a dot matrix printer
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