: The use of the tilde in English? The 'tilde' key, or (~) is commonly found in programming and in other languages to express repetition of characters, for example, 'Woooo!' would become 'Woo~!'

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It seems that in old manuscript documents the tilda represented the repetition of 'm' or 'n' as shown in the example here (Susannah). [From parish register of St Mary-in-the-Marsh in Kent.]

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The tilde symbol is commonly used for:

Expressing approximations.
Mathematical and programming processes.

It generally is never used in fiction and would probably confuse the reader because of that. However, it has more uses in other languages. In Chinese with instant messaging stuff, sometimes you can put a little '~' on the end of your sentence to be cool, casual, and stuff, but that's not done in English. Also, the Chinese keyboard on your phone gives a lot of these crazy faces like ~ (≧▽≦) /~ that use the tilde.

I wouldn't use it in fiction unless you absolutely have to. It isn't used in the context of fiction and generally in English, only used for approximation.

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Other than indicating approximations for dates and numbers (e.g., ~100 CE), I am not aware of any commonly-recognized uses for the tilde. If you use it for other purposes in a text, I'd recommend putting in extra context to make the meaning clear early on in the text.

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