: Re: 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~!'

@Sims2267584

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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