Strangetilde

Strangetilde is a neologism used to refer to a stylized tilde, either as a typographic ornament or as a provisional mathematical operator. The term is not part of any formal standard, and its meaning varies with context. In practice, it appears in informal writing, design experiments, and speculative notation discussions rather than in established curricula.

In typography and font design, strangetilde may describe a tilde that is elongated, curved, or combined with another diacritic to create a distinctive glyph. Designers use such variants to achieve decorative headings, experimental logos, or linguistic transcriptions that require a nonstandard diacritic. The use of strangetilde in this sense is largely aesthetic and contextual.

In mathematical or computational prose, strangetilde is sometimes proposed as a variant of the tilde operator (~) to indicate a modified form of similarity or equivalence. Examples include relations that hold only under a restricted model, or approximations with additional qualifiers. There is no universal convention, and the term remains informal and context-dependent.

Unicode does not define a symbol named strangetilde. When needed, a strangetilde glyph can be approximated by placing a tilde over or beside another character using combining diacritics, or by using a font that renders a bespoke glyph.

See also: tilde, diacritic, approximation, equivalence relation.