Tigre Semitic Tigrinya Ge’ez, Semitic tilde [Lat. titulus ‘title’]

Diacritic mark in the shape of a small horizontal snake-like line above a Latin or Greek letter. In Portuguese, the tilde is used to designate nasal vowels: São Paolo, naciões (‘nations’); in ancient Greek, and in Lithuanian dictionaries, the tilde marks a distinctive syllabic tone; in Spanish it denotes a palatal n ‹ñ›, in older printings it marked a double consonant or served as an n. In Green-landic it marks vowel length as well as following-consonant length. It is used in non-Latin scripts, e.g. the Persian-Arabic script.