84-609: Not to be confused with tilde , the ~ symbol. Tilda or TILDA may refer to: Tilda, a variant of the female given name Matilda Tilda (food manufacturer) , British food brand specializing in rice Tilda (software) , GTK terminal emulator Tilda Johnson, the secret identity of Nightshade Tilda Newra , municipality near Raipur City, India Tilda Swinton (born 1960), British actress Tilda Thamar (1921–1989), Argentine actress The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) List of storms named Tilda Topics referred to by
168-600: A combining tilde. Greek and Cyrillic letters with tilde ( Α͂ ᾶ , Η͂ ῆ , Ι͂ ῖ , ῗ, Υ͂ ῦ , ῧ and А̃ а̃ , Ә̃ ә̃ , Е̃ е̃ , И̃ и̃ , О̃ о̃ , У̃ у̃ , Ј̃ j̃ ) are formed using this method. The English language does not use the tilde as a diacritic, though it is used in some loanwords . The standalone form of the symbol is used more widely. Informally, it means "approximately" , "about", or "around", such as "~30 minutes before", meaning " approximately 30 minutes before". It may also mean "similar to", including "of
252-474: A dead key mechanism can be provided. With the latter, a mark is made when a dead key is typed, but unlike normal keys, the paper carriage does not move on and thus the next letter to be typed is printed under that accent. Typewriters for Spanish typically have a dedicated key for Ñ /ñ but, as Portuguese uses à /ã and Õ /õ, a single dead-key (rather than take two keys to dedicate) is the most practical solution. The tilde symbol did not exist independently as
336-513: A movable type or hot-lead printing character since the type cases for Spanish or Portuguese would include sorts for the accented forms. The first ASCII standard (X3.64-1963) did not have a tilde. Like Portuguese and Spanish, the French, German and Scandinavian languages also needed symbols in excess of the basic 26 needed for English. The ASA worked with and through the CCITT to internationalize
420-522: A sarcasm mark . The sign is used as a replacement for the chōon , katakana character, in Japanese, extending the final syllable. In practice the full-width tilde ( 全角チルダ , zenkaku chiruda ) (Unicode U+FF5E ～ FULLWIDTH TILDE ), is often used instead of the wave dash ( 波ダッシュ , nami dasshu ) (Unicode U+301C 〜 WAVE DASH ), because the Shift JIS code for
504-631: A , e , i , o and u to produce á , é , í , ó and ú , reducing the number of sorts needed from 5 to 1. The typebars of "normal" characters struck a rod as they moved the metal character desired toward the ribbon and platen, and each rod depression moved the platen forward the width of one character. Dead keys had a typebar shaped so as not to strike the rod. In English-speaking countries, ordinary typewriters printing fixed-width characters were standardized to print six horizontal lines per vertical inch, and had either of two variants of character width, one called pica for ten characters per horizontal inch and
588-540: A contraction mark placed over the "n". Such a mark could denote the omission of one letter or several letters. This saved on the expense of the scribe's labor and the cost of vellum and ink. Medieval European charters written in Latin are largely made up of such abbreviated words with contraction marks and other abbreviations; only uncommon words were given in full. The text of the Domesday Book of 1086, relating for example, to
672-504: A cylinder inside a wooden box. In 1874, the cylinder was replaced by a carriage, moving beneath the writing head. Then, in 1875, the well-known "tall model" was patented, which was the first of the writing balls that worked without electricity. Malling-Hansen attended the world exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878 and he received the first-prize for his invention at both exhibitions. The first typewriter to be commercially successful
756-421: A firm contract for the next batch. However, Remington was engaged in merger talks, which would eventually result in the creation of Remington Rand and no executives were willing to commit to a firm order. Northeast instead decided to enter the typewriter business for itself, and in 1929 produced the first Electromatic Typewriter. In 1928, Delco , a division of General Motors , purchased Northeast Electric, and
840-400: A hyphenated number (such as a part number or model number). For example, "12~15" means "12 to 15", "~3" means "up to three", and "100~" means "100 and greater". East Asian languages almost always use this convention, but it is sometimes done for clarity in some other languages as well. Chinese uses the wave dash and full-width em dash interchangeably for this purpose. In English, the tilde
924-549: A lack of continuous, reliable electricity. The QWERTY keyboard layout , developed for typewriters in the 1870s, remains the de facto standard for English-language computer keyboards . The origins of this layout still need to be clarified. Similar typewriter keyboards, with layouts optimised for other languages and orthographies, emerged soon afterward, and their layouts have also become standard for computer keyboards in their respective markets. Although many modern typewriters have one of several similar designs, their invention
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#17328554197141008-519: A manufacturer of sewing machines ) to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer . This was the origin of the term typewriter . Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York . It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which, because of the machine's success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers. As with most other early typewriters, because
1092-462: A particular tone that "let[s] the enclosed words perform both sincerity and irony", which can pre-emptively defuse a negative reaction. For example, BuzzFeed journalist Joseph Bernstein interprets the tildes in the following tweet : as a way of making it clear that both the author and reader are aware that the enclosed phrase – "spirit of the season" – "is cliche and we know this quality is beneath our author, and we don't want you to think our author
1176-416: A similar or identical glyph in several fonts, reducing the confusion and incompatibility. Typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys , and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively against the paper with a type element . Thereby,
1260-483: A text as being written in Spanish with little chance of error. Particularly during the 1990s, Spanish-speaking intellectuals and news outlets demonstrated support for the language and the culture by defending this letter against globalisation and computerisation trends that threatened to remove it from keyboards and other standardised products and codes. The Instituto Cervantes , founded by Spain's government to promote
1344-646: A workable design. Some early typing instruments include: By the mid-19th century, the increasing pace of business communication had created a need to mechanize the writing process. Stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates up to 130 words per minute, whereas a writer with a pen was limited to a maximum of 30 words per minute (the 1853 speed record). From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production. In 1865, Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented
1428-402: Is a cliche person generally". Among other uses, the symbol has been used on social media to indicate sarcasm . It may also be used online, especially in informal writing such as fanfiction , to convey a cutesy, playful, or flirtatious tone. In some languages, the tilde is a diacritic mark placed over a letter to indicate a change in its pronunciation: The tilde was firstly used in
1512-446: Is also used in French, for example, « ≈400 mètres » means "approximately 400 meters" .) Before a number the tilde can mean 'approximately'; '~42' means 'approximately 42'. When used with currency symbols that precede the number (national conventions differ), the tilde precedes the symbol, thus for example '~$ 10' means 'about ten dollars'. The symbols ≈ (almost equal to) and ≅ (approximately equal to) are among
1596-422: Is as a diacritic (accent) in combination with a base letter. Its freestanding form is used in modern texts mainly to indicate approximation . The tilde was originally one of a variety of marks written over an omitted letter or several letters as a scribal abbreviation (a "mark of contraction"). Thus, the commonly used words Anno Domini were frequently abbreviated to A Dñi , with an elevated terminal with
1680-647: Is considered the first practical power-operated typewriter in 1914. In 1920, after returning from Army service, he produced a successful model and in 1923 turned it over to the Northeast Electric Company of Rochester for development. Northeast was interested in finding new markets for their electric motors and developed Smathers's design so that it could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and from 1925 Remington Electric typewriters were produced powered by Northeast's motors. After some 2,500 electric typewriters had been produced, Northeast asked Remington for
1764-521: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Tilde The tilde ( / ˈ t ɪ l d ə / , also / ˈ t ɪ l d , - d i , - d eɪ / ) is a grapheme ⟨ ˜ ⟩ or ⟨ ~ ⟩ with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish tilde , which in turn came from the Latin titulus , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use
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#17328554197141848-516: Is often used to express ranges and model numbers in electronics , but rarely in formal grammar or in type-set documents, as a wavy dash preceding a number sometimes represents an approximation (see below). The range tilde is used for various purposes in French , but only to denote ranges of numbers (e.g., « 21~32 degrés Celsius » " means "21 to 32 degrees Celsius") (The symbol U+2248 ≈ ALMOST EQUAL TO (a double tilde )
1932-571: The EUC-KR or UHC code for the wave dash (0xA1AD) to U+223C ∼ TILDE OPERATOR , while IBM and Apple map it to U+301C. Microsoft also uses U+FF5E to map the KS X 1001 raised tilde (0xA2A6), while Apple uses U+02DC ˜ SMALL TILDE . The current Unicode reference glyph for U+301C has been corrected to match the JIS standard in response to a 2014 proposal, which noted that while
2016-555: The Hansen Writing Ball , which went into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. It was a success in Europe and was reported as being used in offices on the European continent as late as 1909. Malling-Hansen used a solenoid escapement to return the carriage on some of his models, which makes him a candidate for the title of inventor of the first "electric" typewriter. The Hansen Writing Ball
2100-491: The Vietnamese alphabet . In phonetics , a tilde is used as a diacritic that is placed above a letter, below it or superimposed onto the middle of it: A tilde between two phonemes indicates optionality, or "alternates with". E.g. ⟨ ɕ ~ ʃ ⟩ could indicate that the sounds may alternate depending on context ( free variation ), or that they vary based on region or speaker, or some other variation. In Estonian ,
2184-403: The combining character facility ( U+0303 ◌̃ COMBINING TILDE , U+0330 ◌̰ COMBINING TILDE BELOW and others) that may be used with any letter or other diacritic to create a customised symbol but this does not mean that the result has any real-world application and are not shown in the table. A tilde diacritic can be added to almost any character by using
2268-519: The font . In 1941, IBM announced the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a typeset page, an effect that was further enhanced by including the 1937 innovation of carbon-film ribbons that produced clearer, sharper words on
2352-1192: The manor of Molland in Devon (see adjacent picture), is highly abbreviated as indicated by numerous tildes. The text with abbreviations expanded is as follows: Mollande tempore regis Eduardi geldabat pro quattuor hidis et uno ferling. Terra est quadraginta carucae. In dominio sunt tres carucae et decem servi et triginta villani et viginti bordarii cum sedecim carucis. Ibi duodecim acrae prati et quindecim acrae silvae. Pastura tres leugae in longitudine et latitudine. Reddit quattuor et viginti libras ad pensam. Huic manerio est adjuncta Blachepole. Elwardus tenebat tempore regis Edwardi pro manerio et geldabat pro dimidia hida. Terra est duae carucae. Ibi sunt quinque villani cum uno servo. Valet viginti solidos ad pensam et arsuram. Eidem manerio est injuste adjuncta Nimete et valet quindecim solidos. Ipsi manerio pertinet tercius denarius de Hundredis Nortmoltone et Badentone et Brantone et tercium animal pasturae morarum. On typewriters designed for languages that routinely use diacritics (accent marks), there are two possible solutions. Keys can be dedicated to precomposed characters or alternatively
2436-422: The polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek , as a variant of the circumflex , representing a rise in pitch followed by a return to standard pitch. Later, it was used to make abbreviations in medieval Latin documents. When an ⟨n⟩ or ⟨m⟩ followed a vowel, it was often omitted, and a tilde (physically, a small ⟨N⟩ ) was placed over the preceding vowel to indicate
2520-490: The underscore ) were quickly reused by software as additional syntax, basically becoming new types of syntactic symbols that a programming language could use. As this usage became predominant, type design gradually evolved so these diacritic characters became larger and more vertically centered, making them useless as overprinted diacritics but much easier to read as free-standing characters that had come to be used for entirely different and novel purposes. Most modern fonts align
2604-580: The Bar-Let and the Corona No. 3 Typewriter have two separate shift keys, a "CAP" shift (for uppercase) and a "FIG" shift (for numbers and symbols). The Murray code was developed for a teletypewriter with a similar three-row typewriter keyboard. To facilitate typewriter use in business settings, a tab (tabulator) key was added in the late nineteenth century. Before using the key, the operator had to set mechanical "tab stops", pre-designated locations to which
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2688-573: The CCITT requirements, replacing the up-arrow and left-arrow with diacriticals, adding diacritical meanings to the apostrophe and quotation mark, and making the number sign a dual for the tilde. Thus ISO 646 was born (and the ASCII standard updated to X3.64-1967), providing the tilde and other symbols as optional characters. ISO 646 and ASCII incorporated many of the overprinting lower-case diacritics from typewriters, including tilde. Overprinting
2772-536: The Simplex Typewriter Company made index typewriters for 1/40 the price of a Remington typewriter. The index typewriter's niche appeal however soon disappeared as, on the one hand new keyboard typewriters became lighter and more portable, and on the other refurbished second-hand machines began to become available. The last widely available western index machine was the Mignon typewriter produced by AEG which
2856-585: The Spanish language internationally, chose as its logo a highly stylised Ñ with a large tilde. The 24-hour news channel CNN in the US later adopted a similar strategy on its existing logo for the launch of its Spanish-language version , therefore being written as CN͠N. And similarly to the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Spain men's national basketball team is nicknamed "ÑBA". In Spanish itself
2940-461: The United States—but before the advent of daisywheel and electronic machines—the typewriter market faced strong competition from less expensive typewriters from Asia, including Brother Industries and Silver Seiko Ltd. of Japan. In most of the early typewriters, the typebars struck upward against the paper, pressed against the bottom of the platen , so the typist could not see the text as it
3024-562: The base vowel: mão "hand", from Lat. manu- ; razões "reasons", from Lat. rationes . This usage has been adopted in the orthographies of several native languages of South America , such as Guarani and Nheengatu , as well as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and many other phonetic alphabets. For example, [ljɔ̃] is the IPA transcription of the pronunciation of the French place-name Lyon . In Breton ,
3108-417: The basket of typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket shift", or the paper-holding carriage, in which case the typewriter is described as "carriage shift". Either mechanism caused a different portion of the typebar to come in contact with the ribbon/platen. The result is that each typebar could type two different characters, cutting the number of keys and typebars in half (and simplifying
3192-429: The carriage would advance when the tab key was pressed. This facilitated the typing of columns of numbers, freeing the operator from the need to manually position the carriage. The first models had one tab stop and one tab key; later ones allowed as many stops as desired, and sometimes had multiple tab keys, each of which moved the carriage a different number of spaces ahead of the decimal point (the tab stop), to facilitate
3276-558: The code-set, to meet the basic needs of at least the Western European languages. It appears to have been at their May 13–15, 1963 meeting that the CCITT decided that the proposed ISO 7-bit code standard would be suitable for their needs if a lower case alphabet and five diacritical marks [...] were added to it. At the October 29–31 meeting, then, the ISO subcommittee altered the ISO draft to meet
3360-409: The concept that each key was attached to a typebar that had the corresponding letter molded, in reverse, into its striking head. When a key was struck briskly and firmly, the typebar hit a ribbon (usually made of inked fabric ), making a printed mark on the paper wrapped around a cylindrical platen . The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing
3444-444: The diacritic in ⟨ñ⟩ is called "virgulilla" ( IPA: [birɣuˈliʝa] ) ( yeísta ) or ( IPA: [birɣuˈliʎa] ) (non-yeísta). Current languages in which the tilded ⟨n⟩ ( ⟨ñ⟩ ) is used for the palatal nasal consonant /ɲ/ include In Vietnamese , a tilde over a vowel represents a creaky rising tone ( ngã ). Letters with the tilde are not considered separate letters of
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3528-461: The digraph ⟨nn⟩ in Spanish. In this language, ⟨ñ⟩ is considered a separate letter called eñe ( IPA: [ˈeɲe] ), rather than a letter-diacritic combination; it is placed in Spanish dictionaries between the letters ⟨n⟩ and ⟨o⟩ . In Spanish, the word tilde actually refers to diacritics in general, e.g. the acute accent in José , while
3612-505: The electric typewriter came in 1910, when Charles and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical teletypewriter . The Krums' machine, named the Morkrum Printing Telegraph, used a typewheel rather than individual typebars. This machine was used for the first commercial teletypewriter system on Postal Telegraph Company lines between Boston and New York City in 1910. James Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented what
3696-554: The electric typewriter was laid by the Universal Stock Ticker , invented by Thomas Edison in 1870. This device remotely printed letters and numbers on a stream of paper tape from input generated by a specially designed typewriter at the other end of a telegraph line. Some electric typewriters were patented in the 19th century, but the first machine known to be produced in series is the Cahill of 1900. Another electric typewriter
3780-519: The existing Unicode reference glyph had been matched by fonts from the discontinued Windows XP , all other major platforms including later versions of Microsoft Windows shipped with fonts matching the JIS reference glyph for U+301C. The JIS / Shift JIS wave dash is still formally mapped to U+301C as of JIS X 0213 , whereas the WHATWG Encoding Standard used by HTML5 follows Microsoft in mapping 0x8160 to U+FF5E. These two code points have
3864-508: The far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. By about 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had reached a somewhat standardized design. There were minor variations from one manufacturer to another, but most typewriters followed
3948-583: The front side of the platen, became standard. One of the first was the Daugherty Visible, introduced in 1893, which also introduced the four-bank keyboard that became standard, although the Underwood which came out two years later was the first major typewriter with these features. A significant innovation was the shift key , introduced with the Remington No. 2 in 1878. This key physically "shifted" either
4032-420: The index type--albeit with a very much larger index and number of type elements. Embossing tape label makers are the most common index typewriters today, and perhaps the most common typewriters of any kind still being manufactured. The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing the typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at
4116-411: The internal mechanisms considerably). The obvious use for this was to allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case , but normally the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special symbols such as percent, % , and ampersand, & . Before the shift key, typewriters had to have a separate key and typebar for upper-case letters; in essence, the typewriter had two keyboards, one above
4200-484: The keyboard. In the early part of the 20th century, a typewriter was marketed under the name Noiseless and advertised as "silent". It was developed by Wellington Parker Kidder and the first model was marketed by the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1917. Noiseless portables sold well in the 1930s and 1940s, and noiseless standards continued to be manufactured until the 1960s. In a conventional typewriter
4284-520: The machine produces a legible written document composed of ink and paper. By the end of the 19th century, a person who used such a device was also referred to as a type writer . The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874, but did not become common in offices in the United States until after the mid-1880s. The typewriter quickly became an indispensable tool for practically all writing other than personal handwritten correspondence. It
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#17328554197144368-494: The missing letter; this is the origin of the use of tilde to indicate nasalization (compare the development of the umlaut as an abbreviation of ⟨e⟩ .) The practice of using the tilde over a vowel to indicate omission of an ⟨n⟩ or ⟨m⟩ continued in printed books in French as a means of reducing text length until the 17th century. It was also used in Portuguese and Spanish . The tilde
4452-414: The number of whose characters (sorts) was constrained by the physical limits of the machine, the number of keys required was reduced by the use of dead keys . Diacritics such as ´ ( acute accent ) would be assigned to a dead key , which did not move the platen forward, permitting another character to be imprinted at the same location; thus a single dead key such as the acute accent could be combined with
4536-410: The opposite direction. By 1900, notable typewriter manufacturers included E. Remington and Sons , IBM , Godrej , Imperial Typewriter Company , Oliver Typewriter Company , Olivetti , Royal Typewriter Company , Smith Corona , Underwood Typewriter Company , Facit , Adler , and Olympia-Werke . After the market had matured under the market dominance of large companies from Britain, Europe and
4620-502: The original reference glyph for U+301C was reflected, incorrectly, when Unicode imported the JIS wave dash. In other platforms such as the classic Mac OS and macOS , 0x8160 is correctly mapped to U+301C. It is generally difficult, if not impossible, for users of Japanese Windows to type U+301C, especially in legacy, non-Unicode applications. A similar situation exists regarding the Korean KS X 1001 character set, in which Microsoft maps
4704-425: The other elite , for twelve. This differed from the use of these terms in printing, where pica is a linear unit (approximately 1 ⁄ 6 of an inch) used for any measurement, the most common one being the height of a typeface. Some ribbons were inked in black and red stripes, each being half the width and running the entire length of the ribbon. A lever on most machines allowed switching between colors, which
4788-513: The other symbols used to express approximation . The wave dash ( 波ダッシュ , nami dasshu ) is used for various purposes in Japanese, including to denote ranges of numbers (e.g., 5〜10 means between 5 and 10) in place of dashes or brackets, and to indicate origin. The wave dash is also used to separate a title and a subtitle in the same line, as a colon is used in English. When used in conversations via email or instant messenger it may be used as
4872-684: The other. With the shift key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain models further reduced the number of keys and typebars by making each key perform three functions – each typebar could type three different characters. These little three-row machines were portable and could be used by journalists. Such three-row machines were popular with WWI journalists because they were lighter and more compact than four-bank typewriters, while they could type just as fast and use just as many symbols. Such three-row machines, such as
4956-417: The plain ASCII " spacing " (free-standing) tilde at the same level as dashes , or only slightly higher. The free-standing tilde is at code 126 in ASCII, where it was inherited into Unicode as U+007E. A similar shaped mark ( ⁓ ) is known in typography and lexicography as a swung dash : these are used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word. As indicated by the etymological origin of
5040-475: The ribbon being struck at all. This enabled the keys to hit the paper unobstructed, and was used for cutting stencils for stencil duplicators (aka mimeograph machines). The first typewriter to have the sliding type bars (laid out horizontally like a fan) that enable a typewriter to be "noiseless" was the American made Rapid which appeared briefly on the market in 1890. The Rapid also had the remarkable ability for
5124-423: The same order of magnitude as", such as " x ~ y " meaning that x and y are of the same order of magnitude. Another approximation symbol is the double tilde ≈ , meaning "approximately/almost equal to". The tilde is also used to indicate congruence of shapes by placing it over an = symbol, thus ≅ . In more recent digital usage, tildes on either side of a word or phrase have sometimes come to convey
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#17328554197145208-407: The same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Tilda . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tilda&oldid=1219305033 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
5292-532: The symbol ⟨ñ⟩ after a vowel means that the letter ⟨n⟩ serves only to give the vowel a nasalised pronunciation, without being itself pronounced, as it normally is. For example, ⟨an⟩ gives the pronunciation [ãn] whereas ⟨añ⟩ gives [ã] . In the DMG romanization of Tunisian Arabic , the tilde is used for nasal vowels õ and ṏ. The tilded ⟨n⟩ ( ⟨ñ⟩ , ⟨Ñ⟩ ) developed from
5376-414: The symbol ⟨õ⟩ stands for the close-mid back unrounded vowel , and it is considered an independent letter. In modern internet slang , the tilde can be used to signify endearment or love, i.e. "Hello master~". It is commonly used in the furry and femboy communities and can also be used as a diminutive, akin to adding the "ee" sound to the end of a word. Some languages and alphabets use
5460-479: The tilde for other purposes, such as: The tilde is used in various ways in punctuation, including: In some languages (such as in French), a tilde or a tilde-like wave dash (Unicode: U+301C 〜 WAVE DASH ) may be used as a punctuation mark (instead of an unspaced hyphen , en dash or em dash ) between two numbers , to indicate a range . Doing so avoids the risk of confusion with subtraction or
5544-403: The type bar reaches the end of its travel simply by striking the ribbon and paper. The Noiseless, developed by Kidder, has a complex lever mechanism that decelerates the type bar mechanically before pressing it against the ribbon and paper in an attempt to dampen the noise. Although electric typewriters would not achieve widespread popularity until nearly a century later, the basic groundwork for
5628-762: The typebars strike upwards, the typist could not see the characters as they were typed. The index typewriter came into the market in the early 1880s. The index typewriter uses a pointer or stylus to choose a letter from an index. The pointer is mechanically linked so that the letter chosen could then be printed, most often by the activation of a lever. The index typewriter was briefly popular in niche markets. Although they were slower than keyboard type machines, they were mechanically simpler and lighter. They were therefore marketed as being suitable for travellers and, because they could be produced more cheaply than keyboard machines, as budget machines for users who needed to produce small quantities of typed correspondence. For example,
5712-605: The typewriter business was spun off as Electromatic Typewriters, Inc. In 1933, Electromatic was acquired by IBM , which then spent $ 1 million on a redesign of the Electromatic Typewriter, launching the IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01. In 1931, an electric typewriter was introduced by Varityper Corporation. It was called the Varityper , because a narrow cylinder-like wheel could be replaced to change
5796-444: The typing of columns with numbers of different length ($ 1.00, $ 10.00, $ 100.00, etc.) Languages such as French, Spanish, and German required diacritics , special signs attached to or on top of the base letter: for example, a combination of the acute accent ´ plus e produced é ; ~ plus n produced ñ . In metal typesetting , ⟨é⟩ , ⟨ñ⟩ , and others were separate sorts . With mechanical typewriters,
5880-455: The typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at the far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. Typewriters for languages written right-to-left operate in
5964-457: The typist to have entire control of the carriage by manipulation of the keyboard alone. The two keys that achieve this are positioned at the top of the keyboard (seen in the detail image below). They are a "Lift" key that advances the paper, on the platen, to the next line and a "Return" key that causes the carriage to automatically swing back to the right, ready for one to type the new line. So an entire page could be typed without one's hands leaving
6048-510: The wave dash, 0x8160, which should be mapped to U+301C, is instead mapped to U+FF5E in Windows code page 932 ( Microsoft 's code page for Japanese), a widely used extension of Shift JIS. This decision avoided a shape definition error in the original (6.2) Unicode code charts: the wave dash reference glyph in JIS / Shift JIS matches the Unicode reference glyph for U+FF5E FULLWIDTH TILDE , while
6132-546: The word tilde is used more generally for diacritics, including the stress-marking acute accent. The diacritic ~ is more commonly called virgulilla or la tilde de la eñe , and is not considered an accent mark in Spanish, but rather simply a part of the letter ñ (much like the dot over ı makes an i character that is familiar to readers of English). Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with tilde" as precomposed characters and these are displayed below. In addition, many more symbols may be composed using
6216-459: The word "tilde" in English, this symbol has been closely associated with the Spanish language . The connection stems from the use of the tilde above the letter ⟨n⟩ to form the (different) letter ⟨ñ⟩ in Spanish, a feature shared by only a few other languages , most of which are historically connected to Spanish. This peculiarity can help non-native speakers quickly identify
6300-400: Was also used occasionally to make other abbreviations, such as over the letter ⟨q⟩ , making q̃ , to signify the word que ("that"). It is also as a small ⟨n⟩ that the tilde originated when written above other letters, marking a Latin ⟨n⟩ which had been elided in old Galician-Portuguese. In modern Portuguese it indicates nasalization of
6384-443: Was incremental, developed by numerous inventors working independently or in competition with each other over a series of decades. As with the automobile , the telephone, and telegraph , several people contributed insights and inventions that eventually resulted in ever more commercially successful instruments. Historians have estimated that some form of the typewriter was invented 52 times as thinkers and tinkerers tried to come up with
6468-410: Was intended to work by putting a backspace code between the codes for letter and diacritic. However even at that time, mechanisms that could do this or any other overprinting were not widely available, did not work for capital letters, and were impossible on video displays, with the result that this concept failed to gain significant acceptance. Consequently, many of these free-standing diacritics (and
6552-526: Was patented in 1868 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes , Frank Haven Hall , Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin , although Sholes soon disowned the machine and refused to use or even recommend it. The working prototype was made by clock-maker and machinist Matthias Schwalbach. Hall, Glidden and Soule sold their shares in the patent (US 79,265) to Densmore and Sholes, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons (then famous as
6636-486: Was produced by the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company , of Stamford, Connecticut , in 1902. Like the manual Blickensderfer typewriters, it used a cylindrical typewheel rather than individual typebars. The machine was produced in several variants but apparently not a commercial success, having come to market ahead of its time, before ubiquitous electrification . The next step in the development of
6720-465: Was produced until 1934. Considered one of the very best of the index typewriters, part of the Mignon's popularity was that it featured interchangeable indexes as well as type , fonts and character sets . This is something very few keyboard machines were capable of--and only at considerable added cost. Although they were pushed out of the market in most of the world by keyboard machines, successful Japanese and Chinese typewriters typewriters are of
6804-410: Was produced with only upper-case characters. The Writing Ball was a template for inventor Frank Haven Hall to create a derivative that would produce letter prints cheaper and faster. Malling-Hansen developed his typewriter further through the 1870s and 1880s and made many improvements, but the writing head remained the same. On the first model of the writing ball from 1870, the paper was attached to
6888-402: Was typed. What was typed was not visible until a carriage return caused it to scroll into view. The difficulty with any other arrangement was ensuring the typebars fell back into place reliably when the key was released. This was eventually achieved with various ingenious mechanical designs and so-called "visible typewriters" which used frontstriking, in which the typebars struck forward against
6972-404: Was useful for bookkeeping entries where negative amounts were highlighted in red. The red color was also used on some selected characters in running text, for emphasis. When a typewriter had this facility, it could still be fitted with a solid black ribbon; the lever was then used to switch to fresh ribbon when the first stripe ran out of ink. Some typewriters also had a third position which stopped
7056-513: Was widely used by professional writers, in offices, in business correspondence in private homes, and by students preparing written assignments. Typewriters were a standard fixture in most offices up to the 1980s. After that, they began to be largely supplanted by personal computers running word processing software. Nevertheless, typewriters remain common in some parts of the world. For example, typewriters are still used in many Indian cities and towns, especially in roadside and legal offices, due to
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