What is the purpose of this symbol ~ on the keyboard?

Question

what the hell is it for???

Answer 1

The "tilde" is a "diacritical mark" used to help pronunciation of a letter. In Spanish the mark is sometimes called an "en-ye" (short "e"). That nickname imitates the sound of the letter itself when the mark is above the letter.

Other diacritical marks are the accents used in French, and the umlaut used in German. English does not employ them, but almost every other tongue does. You can have some fun looking at the variety of them if you have Microsoft Word - just select the "insert" file menu, then go to "symbol" and select that. Scroll through the various combinations. it's fun.

The symbol is also used in web-speak, as other posters have shown you, as well as in programming text.

Answer 2

It's called a tilde (pronounced till-d) and it is used mostly in the original operating system called DOS or better known now as the command prompt. Because file names where limited to 8 characters. So if you had a file or folder to look up that was longer than 8 such as "program files" you would use the tilde like this: progra~1, in order to change to that directory (folder). Try it, click on start, run, then type cmd (for command) and it will pull up an old DOS window. Then at the prompt type: dir
and you'll see it in action.

Answer 3

This symbol is called a tilde (pronounced til-da). It is just to use if you want to add a little something extra to your signature like for example my signature is Jenny Ryan (not my real name using a fantasy one for example's sake). My signature would look like this:

Jenny Ryan

unless I added a little something. This would be very plain. I could add

~~~Jenny Ryan~~~

and see how much nicer it looks with the tildes.

Answer 4

It is what they call a "hot key" or a key that takes you directly to a program that has been preprogrammed. For instance, I type medical notes and there is a whole paragraph loaded elsewhere in the system and I can type the abbreviation for this and hit that key and it will take me to where this is or load it directly so i do not have to type that paragraph. I always just called it the "squiggly mark."

Answer 5

This symbol was used on legacy OS, MS-DOS by Example... for represent files with more 8 chars. By example. MyDocuments.txt = MyDocu~1.txt.

Answer 6

I believe it means "approximately", it is a math symbol.

Answer 7

it's a tilde... it is used when a tilde is needed.. it often means about... ie.... 1 + .99 ~ 2... and sometimes in webaddress... www.yahoo.com/~username or to make things ~*Girly*~ or to make a spermy o~

Answer 8

It's called a "tilde" character. (TILL-Dee).
Sometimes use as a delimiter or separator character.

Answer 9

i think it is for when you r writing an email or a letter and u sign ur name like this

~ judy

Answer 10

I like that symbol. it looks cool ~~~~~~~