Wave Dash

Between endpoints, read it as “from…to…”. The wave dash connects times, prices or places: 「東京〜京都」 means Tokyo to Kyoto, and 10:00〜12:00 means ten to twelve. It can also join a title to its subtitle.

It began as a connector, not a stretched voice. A survey of digitized Japanese textbooks found its earliest sampled uses in 1941, more examples around 1945, only one vertical-writing example, from 1950, and a textbook swapping a dash for the wave form in 1957. The study reads this as gradual growth in horizontal, left-to-right writing, linking spans and labels, rather than a spin-off of the long-vowel mark ー. Sample dates are not a proven birthday.

What does 〜 mean when someone sends it?

It shapes the tone of voice, not the meaning. At the end of a casual Japanese message, 〜 makes the last sound linger: relaxed, playful or cute. A 2003 study of Japanese message boards describes wavy lines as visual lengthening, and a 2007 chat study found the mark inside words as well as at their ends.

Don't read a lingering sound as proof of affection. The wave dash tells you how the phrase sounds; the words and your relationship tell you how to take it. Stacking several stretches it further without making it warmer.

In a formal notice, keep the range and drop the chatty tail. Japan’s 2022 guide to public writing lists the wave form for start-to-end ranges, asks for consistency and warns against overuse.

Why did my wave dash turn into ～?

Old Japanese character mappings swap in a lookalike. 〜 comes from the Japanese JIS C 6226 character standard of 1978. Some major systems mapped that JIS character to U+FF5E, FULLWIDTH TILDE, instead of U+301C. In Unicode 8.0, the reference drawing of 〜 was changed to the wide tilde shape used in commercial fonts, so the two can look identical.

Check the code point when exact text matters. A font draws the shape; it cannot show whether the text holds U+301C or U+FF5E, and a search for one can miss the other.