The accentual mark placed over n, and sometimes over l, in Spanish words [thus, ñ, l], indicating that, in pronunciation, the sound of the following vowel is to be preceded by that of the initial, or consonantal, y.

the diacritic mark (~) placed above an n in some orthographies to indicate a palatalized sound, as in Spanish ca–on. the same mark placed above a vowel in phonetic transcription to indicate that the vowel is nasalized.

a diacritical mark (~) placed over the letter n in Spanish to indicate a palatal nasal sound or over a vowel in Portuguese to indicate nasalization

an accent mark placed over a letter, for instance in the spanish senor to signify pronunciation of the 'n' as 'ny'

The tilde (~) signifies an individual user's Web site when housed on a server. For example, http://www.cuteftp.com/~user - says that user is a cuteftp.com user and that his homepage is on cuteftp.com's server. The tilde character is on the top line of your keyboard to the far left.

The wavy line at the top left on the keyboard.

The scribbly horizontal line (~) is called a tilde (pronounced "tilda"). The tilde is located on the upper left on most keyboards usually above the backquote. Traditionally, a UNIX user's home directory has been known as ~. Therefore, hostname.domain.name/~username is the generic form for a user's home Web space located in his or her www directory. When the Web server sees a URL like this, it knows to look in username's home directory for a WWW directory.