Fullwidth tilde

～ is the fullwidth form of ASCII ~, made for wide East Asian text. In Japanese it can stand in for wave dash 〜, the range mark. Unicode Standard 18.0 notes that some legacy systems still map that mark to ～, so fonts may hide which character is present.

Text symbol

What ～ means

They have separate histories, but can look alike.

The fullwidth punctuation set preserves compatibility with East Asian legacy character sets, letting ASCII signs occupy the same width as CJK text. Japan’s wave dash 〜 marks ranges and appears in JIS C 6226 (1978).

Early Unicode charts drew 〜 with its wave reversed; Unicode corrected that reference glyph in Unicode 8.0 (2015). Unicode Standard 18.0 shows it as a wide tilde-like line, so some fonts make it look like ～.

Part of collections

〒

Japanese Text Symbols

Ａ

Fullwidth Text (Vaporwave Letters)

Don't confuse it with

〜

Wave Dash

Japan’s wave dash marks ranges; its code point is U+301C, separate from this page’s U+FF5E, though fonts may draw them alike.

〰

Wavy Dash

The wavy dash is a longer, many-wave line, also an emoji. ～ is a single tilde.

∼

Tilde Operator

The tilde operator is a math sign for "similar to". ～ is the fullwidth punctuation tilde.

Combination ideas

A drawn-out, cute "thank you!" in Japanese chat.

A Japanese time range: from 10 to 12 o'clock.

A sing-song or humming tone at the end of a sentence.

A playful, sing-song greeting in fullwidth text.

Questions people ask

Why does ～ show as a box on some devices?

Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.