h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is there any grammatical use for that thing? Or is it on keyboards merely for the programmers and for people with webaddresses with it in?

all I could find

"
Pronunciation: (til'du), [key]
—n.
1. a diacritic (~) placed over an n, as in Spanish mañana, to indicate a palatal nasal sound or over a vowel, as in Portuquese são, to indicate nasalization.
2. See swung dash.
3. Math.a symbol (~) indicating equivalency or similarity between two values.
4. Logic.a similar symbol indicating negation."

from infoplease.com

Hmm. I wonder if there's anything else.

It said "see swung dash"... So I did

"a mark of punctuation (~) used in place of a word or part of a word previously spelled out."

Spiffy.

Spi~y.

For what it's worth... The tilde, as its name suggests, comes from Spanish. Its shape vaguely resembles a little n, with good reason. Sometime during the early Romance period, a ny sound developed (from 'ni' in Classical Latin) - this sound is still present in all Western Romance languages. It was originally spelt 'nn' in Spanish, as in 'mannana'.

At some point scribes started putting one 'n' on top of the other - this gradually evolved into the tilde, as in mañana. Portuguese then took the tilde to represent a nasalised vowel where there was formerly an 'n' sound. Later it gained mathematical, computer programming and other uses.

The main uses of tilde seem to be:

1. As a diacritical mark in Spanish and Portuguese. But the isolated tilde is no use for these.

2. As a "logical not" sign in Mathematics.

3. As a place holder in dictionaries, where it means the word that is the subject of the dictionary entry

4. On the web to denote personal web spaces within a Service Provider's are. For example, http: //domain/~user

(There shouldn't be a space in that link but I don't want the Moderators to fail it as an invalid link)

The use of ~userid in a web address isn't the only computey use. ~ indicates one's own home directory in Unix/Linux; ~userid where the userid can be yours or another's is a convenient way of specifiying the home directory of that user without using the full path and is certainly quicker than say /home/machinename/groupname/userid/
The ~userid in a web address is a similar usage but specifies the public_html directory of that user.

>a ny sound developed (from 'ni' in Classical Latin)<


~~~~~~~~~~~~~!
We are the Knights that say ~!

Liam.

I have long been of the opinion that @ had been generally un-used before the advent of email. So it's equally plausible the another paradigm shift could cause ~ to become more popular.


Geggs

The @ is used in accounting to show the unit price. As in:

3 off(it is supposed to be off in this case) hours labour @ £18.50ph.

Liam.

I grant the accounting/maths usage. But to the world at large it was just taking up space on a keyboard.


Geggs

I remember a year or so ago a paper ran a competition to name the @ sign. I think the winner was 'amper~sat', the logic being that '&' is called an ampers~and. (My tildes for emphasis). Does anyone know if this is actually correct? Does the @ have a proper name?

The @ sign is called the at sign or just "at" in English. People keep on talking about making up a name for it, but I can't see what's wrong with the name it has at the moment.

I don't agree that the @ was not used before e-mail. It used to be perfectly normal to see things like 12 tomatoes @ 6d each. This wasn't just accountants. It was normal usage by normal people.

6d? Had you seen it used more recently than that?


Geggs

OK, so there is a 10-year gap in my memory from early seventies, when decimal money came in, until early 80s when people started using at in e-mail adresses. I can't remember whether I saw anybody using at in that time.

Of course it's also a brand name for poshly packaged rice!