singletilde

Singletilde is not a standard term in Unicode, typography, or linguistics. In practice, it appears as a descriptive label used in some font design notes or documentation to refer to a tilde diacritic applied to a single character, as opposed to more complex tilde-related glyphs or standalone tilde symbols. Because it is not officially defined, its exact meaning can vary by context.

In orthography and phonetics, the tilde is commonly used as a diacritic over a letter to indicate nasalization in many languages. For example, in Latin script, vowels with tilde appear in Portuguese (ã, õ) and mark nasal vowels. In phonetic transcription, a tilde placed over a vowel can signify nasalization or, in some conventions, other nuanced vocal qualities. The term singletilde, when encountered, typically refers to this single-tilde diacritic applied to a single base letter.

In computing and encoding, the tilde can be represented either as a precomposed character (such as ã U+00E3) or as a combining diacritic (tilde U+0303) attached to a base letter. A reference to singletilde in software or font files might point to the use of a combining tilde on one glyph, or to a single-tilde variant within a font’s glyph set. Different font families may name or group such glyphs differently, but there is no universal standard for the term.

See also: tilde (diacritic), nasalization, diacritics, combining characters.