Editing Tilde (section)

==History==

===Use by medieval scribes===

The tilde was originally one of a variety of marks written over an omitted letter or several letters as a [[scribal abbreviation]] (a "mark of contraction").<ref>Martin, Charles Trice (1910). The record interpreter : a collection of abbreviations, Latin words and names used in English historical manuscripts and records (2nd ed.). London, preface, p.5 [https://archive.org/details/recordinterprete00martuoft/page/n9/mode/2up]</ref> Thus, the commonly used words ''[[Anno Domini]]'' were frequently abbreviated to ''A<sup>o</sup> Dñi'', with an elevated terminal with a contraction 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 labor and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with contraction marks and other abbreviations; only uncommon words were given in full.

The text of the [[Domesday Book]] of 1086, relating for example, to the [[manor of Molland]] in [[Devon]] (see adjacent picture), is highly [[Scribal abbreviation|abbreviated]] as indicated by numerous tildes.

[[File:Text of Exeter Domesday Book of 1086.jpg|center|thumb|upright=1.35|Text of Exeter [[Domesday Book]] of 1086]]

The text with abbreviations expanded is as follows:
{{blockquote|{{lang|la|Mollande tempore regis Eduardi geldabat pro quattuor hidis et uno ferling. Terra est quadraginta carucae. In dominio sunt tres carucae et decem servi et triginta villani et viginti bordarii cum sedecim carucis. Ibi duodecim acrae prati et quindecim acrae silvae. Pastura tres leugae in longitudine et latitudine. Reddit<!-- This is a real Latin word, meaning "it yields"; please do not "correct" it. --> quattuor et viginti libras ad pensam. 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.}}}}

:{{resize|Translation: ''In the time of King Edward Mollande gelded for four hides and one ferling. The land is forty [[carucate]]s. In the domain there are three barons and ten serfs and thirty peasants and twenty bordars with sixteen barons. There are twelve acres of meadow and fifteen acres of wood. A pasture three leagues in length and breadth. It should weigh four and twenty pounds. Blachepole is attached to this manor. Elward held it in the time of King Edward for a manor and gelded for half a hide. The earth is two carucas. There are five peasants with one servant. It is worth twenty shillings for weighing and burning. The same manor is unjustly attached to Nimes and is worth fifteen shillings. To the manor belongs a third of the penny of the Hundred of Nortmolton and Badenton and Branton, and a third of the cattle of the pasture.''}}

===Role of mechanical typewriters===
{{more|Dead key|Diacritic}}
[[File:Olivetti Lettera 32.JPG|thumb|An [[Olivetti Lettera 32]] typewriter (Portuguese Model) with tilde (and circumflex) dead-key beside {{keypress|Ç}} ]]
[[File:Idazmakina.jpg|thumb|Spanish typewriter (QWERTY keyboard) with dead keys for acute, circumflex, diaeresis and grave accents. Ñ/ñ is present as a precomposed character only.]]<!-- Typewriter made in Italy for Spanish market -->

On [[typewriter]]s designed for languages that routinely use [[diacritic]]s (accent marks), there are two possible solutions. Keys can be dedicated to [[precomposed character]]s or alternatively a [[dead key]] mechanism can be provided. With the latter, a mark is made when a dead key is typed, but unlike normal keys, the paper carriage does not move on and thus the next letter to be typed is printed under that accent. Typewriters for [[Spanish (language)|Spanish]] typically have a dedicated key for [[Ñ]]/ñ but, as [[Portuguese (language)|Portuguese]] uses [[Ã]]/ã and [[Õ]]/õ, a single dead-key (rather than take two keys to dedicate) is the most practical solution.

The tilde symbol did not exist independently as a [[movable type]] or [[Hot metal typesetting|hot-lead]] printing character since the [[type case]]s for Spanish or Portuguese would include [[sort (typesetting)|sort]]s for the accented forms.

===The centralized ASCII tilde <span class="anchor" id="ASCII tilde (U+007E)"></span>===
{| align=right cellpadding="2px" border=0 style="margin-left:2em"
 | align=right |Serif:
 | style="font-size:large; font-family:serif" |—~—
 |-
 | align=right |Sans-serif:
 | style="font-size:large; font-family:sans-serif" |—~—
 |-
 | align=right |Monospace:
 | style="font-size:large; font-family:monospace" |—~—
 |-
 | colspan=2 style="font-size:small" |A free-standing tilde between two em dashes<br/>in three font families
 |}
The first [[ASCII]] standard (X3.64-1963) did not have a tilde.<ref name="Mackenzie_1980">{{cite book |url=https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedCharSets.pdf |title=Coded Character Sets, History and Development |series=The Systems Programming Series |author-last=Mackenzie |author-first=Charles E. |date=1980 |edition=1 |publisher=[[Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.]] |isbn=978-0-201-14460-4 |lccn=77-90165 |access-date=2019-08-25 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160526172151/https://textfiles.meulie.net/bitsaved/Books/Mackenzie_CodedCharSets.pdf |archive-date=May 26, 2016 |url-status=live |df=mdy-all }}</ref>{{rp|246}} Like Portuguese and Spanish, the French, German and [[Scandinavia|Scandinavian]] languages also needed symbols in excess of the basic 26 needed for English. The [[American Standards Association|ASA]] worked with and through the [[CCITT]] to internationalize the code-set, to meet the basic needs of at least the Western European languages.

{{blockquote|It appears to have been at their May 13–15, 1963 meeting that the CCITT decided that the proposed ISO 7-bit code standard would be suitable for their needs if a lower case alphabet and five diacritical marks [...] were added to it.<ref>{{cite web |title=Meeting of CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet |url= https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/ascii-history/ccit.html |publisher=CCITT |date=May 15, 1963}} See Paragraph 3.</ref> At the October 29–31 meeting, then, the ISO subcommittee altered the ISO draft to meet the CCITT requirements, replacing the up-arrow and left-arrow with diacriticals, adding diacritical meanings to the apostrophe and quotation mark, and making the [[number sign]] a dual{{efn|alternative association for the same [[code point]]}} for the tilde.<ref>{{cite web |title=Memorandum to Members, Alternates, and Consultants of A.S.A. X3.2 and task groups |vauthors=((L. L. Griffin, Chairman, X3.2)) | publisher=US Department of the Navy |url=https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/ascii-history/iso.html |page=8 |date=29 November 1963}}</ref>|source=Yucca's free information site (which cites the original sources).<ref>{{cite web|url=https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#60|title=Character histories: notes on some ASCII code positions}}</ref>}}
Thus ISO{{nbsp}}646 was born (and the ASCII standard updated to X3.64-1967), providing the tilde and other symbols as optional characters.<ref name="Mackenzie_1980" />{{rp|247}}{{efn|ISO{{nbsp}}646 (and ASCII, which it includes) is a standard for 7-bit encoding, providing just 96 printable characters (and 32 [[control characters]]). This was insufficient to meet the needs of Western European languages and so the standard specifies certain [[code points]] that are available for national variation. With the arrival of 8-bit "[[extended ASCII]]", this issue was largely mitigated, though not fully resolved until [[Unicode]] was established.}}

ISO{{nbsp}}646 and ASCII incorporated many of the overprinting lower-case diacritics from typewriters, including tilde. Overprinting was intended to work by putting a [[backspace]] code between the codes for letter and diacritic.<ref>{{cite web |title= Second ISO draft proposal {{!}} 6 and 6 bit character codes for information processing interchange |publisher =ISO |date=December 1963 |url=https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/ascii-history/draft.html}} See paragraph 2</ref> {{Citation needed span|However even at that time, mechanisms that could do this or any other overprinting were not widely available, did not work for capital letters, and were impossible on video displays, with the result that this concept failed to gain significant acceptance. Consequently, many of these free-standing diacritics (and the [[underscore]]) were quickly reused by software as additional syntax, basically becoming new types of syntactic symbols that a programming language could use. As this usage became predominant, [[type design]] gradually evolved so these diacritic characters became larger and more vertically centered, making them useless as overprinted diacritics but much easier to read as free-standing characters that had come to be used for entirely different and novel purposes. Most modern fonts align the plain ASCII "[[spacing character|spacing]]" (free-standing) tilde at the same level as [[dash]]es, or only slightly higher.|date=October 2024}}

The free-standing tilde is at code 126 in ASCII, where it was inherited into Unicode as U+007E.

A similar shaped mark ({{char|⁓}}) is known in typography and [[lexicography]] as a [[swung dash]]: these are used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word.<ref>{{Citation | url = http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=swung+dash&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=&o3=&o4=&h=000000000000 | title = WordNet | type = search | edition = 3.0 | contribution = Swung dash}}</ref>

===Connection to Spanish===
{{Main|Ñ}}
[[File:Logotipo del Instituto Cervantes.svg|thumbnail|left|Logo of the Instituto Cervantes]]
[[File:Logo de CNN en Español (2010-2015).svg|thumbnail|right|Logo of CNN en Español]]
As indicated by the etymological origin of the word "tilde" in English, this symbol has been closely associated with the [[Spanish language]]. The connection stems from the use of the tilde above the letter {{angbr|n}} to form the (different) letter {{angbr|ñ}} in Spanish, a feature shared by only [[#Palatal n|a few other languages]], most of which are historically connected to Spanish. This peculiarity can help non-native speakers quickly identify a text as being written in Spanish with little chance of error. Particularly during the 1990s, Spanish-speaking intellectuals and news outlets demonstrated support for the language and the culture by defending this letter against [[globalisation]] and [[computer]]isation trends that threatened to remove it from keyboards and other standardised products and codes.<ref>{{cite web|title=26 argumentos para seguir defendiendo la Ñ|url=http://www.larazon.es/historico/651-26-argumentos-para-seguir-defendiendo-la-n-SLLA_RAZON_352314#.Ttt1ZN8CWth9pio|website=La Razón|access-date=31 January 2016|date=11 January 2011}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/internacionales/batalla-de-la-n-una-aventura-quijotesca-para-defender-el-alma-de-la-lengua-797718.html |title=Batalla de la Ñ: Una aventura quijotesca para defender el alma de la lengua |last=AFP |date=18 November 2004 |website=Periódico ABC Paraguay |access-date=31 January 2016}}</ref> The [[Instituto Cervantes]], founded by [[Spanish government|Spain's government]] to promote the Spanish language internationally, chose as its logo a highly stylised {{char|Ñ}} with a large tilde. The 24-hour news channel [[CNN]] in the US later adopted a similar strategy on its existing logo for the launch of its [[CNN en Español|Spanish-language version]], therefore being written as CN͠N. And similarly to the [[National Basketball Association]] (NBA), the [[Spain men's national basketball team]] is nicknamed "ÑBA".

In Spanish itself the word {{lang|es|tilde}} is used more generally for diacritics, including the stress-marking acute accent.<ref>[http://dle.rae.es/?id=ZkHNOE8 Diccionario de la lengua española], Real Academia Española</ref> The diacritic {{char|~}} is more commonly called {{lang|es|virgulilla}} or {{lang|es|la tilde de la eñe}}, and is not considered an accent mark in Spanish, but rather simply a part of the letter {{char|ñ}} (much like [[tittle|the dot]] over {{char|ı}} makes an {{char|i}} character that is familiar to readers of English).