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What does the squiggly character mean?
My friend wrote this on her Facebook status update: “I now have ~4500 followers on Twitter.” I would have just thought she was just decorating her posts, but then I saw the squiggly character somewhere else the same day and started to wonder. (I have also seen people sign the ends of their emails with things like, “~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Peace & Love ~ ~ ~ ~ ~.”)
Punctuation consternation
That funny looking little squiggly thing you’re seeing there is called a tilde — pronounced “till-duh” or “till-dee,” either being acceptable. The word comes from the Latin titulus, meaning “title” or “superscription,” though the definition has evolved over the years and now has different meanings, depending on the context in which it is used.
In English, the tilde is most commonly used to mean “approximately,” so to use the example in your question, it would read as “I now have approximately 4500 followers on Twitter.” In other contexts it can also mean “similar to” and “of the same order of magnitude.” The tilde also appears as a diacritical mark over a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation.
While the tilde shows up in languages ranging from Basque to Vietnamese, the usage most people in the US would be familiar with is in Spanish. For an example, in the word señor, it changes the pronunciation from what would be “sen-ore” to “sen-yore.”
To type a tilde, look to the left of the number 1 key on the top left of your keyboard. Hold “Shift” and hit that key and you’ll get a tilde. If you to type one over the the letter N, hold down the “Alt” key and type “0209″ on your number pad for a capital Ñ, or “0241″ for a small ñ. Note that you must use the number pad to the right of the keyboard, and not the row above the letters. (Here is a list of other common accents marks and their codes, should you need them.)
As for the email signatures — that is, in fact, just for decoration. Otherwise, they are saying “very approximately peace and love,” or trying to indicate a very strange pronunciation.
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