What ~ means
Before numbers, “about”; after words, a playful vocal stretch. The squiggle in “~10 minutes” makes the time an estimate. In the English greeting “hi~”, it changes the delivery, not the definition.
Paired tildes put a phrase in an exaggerated voice. The English “~ totally normal ~” reads as knowingly cute or ironic, not as maths.
Is a tilde flirting?
Possibly, but one tilde is not much to go on. Read “hey~” alongside the rest of the conversation. You can match the light tone without treating it as a romantic advance.
Sound-stretching is not only an English habit: a 2011 study records sentence-final tildes standing for drawn-out sounds in Chinese online chat. That supports the stretched reading, not a universal flirting code.
Save the sing-song tilde for casual messages; write “about” in formal prose when estimating a quantity.
Do not treat a trailing tilde as proof of attraction.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsDon't confuse it with
3Questions people ask
2Why does ~/ appear in computer commands?
It points to your home directory in shells that perform tilde expansion. `~/Documents` means Documents inside that directory, not a folder literally named ~.
Why did my tilde turn into an accented letter?
A dead key is likely: it waits for the next letter and adds an accent. On layouts with a tilde dead key, pressing Space afterwards produces the standalone mark.
How to type ~
~\007ECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.