Origin of the Tilde

Apr. 8, 2009 — If you looked closely at the sample of Mercator’s Italic lettering you probably wondered why the m was missing from latinaru[m] and scribendaru[m], and why the n had disappeared from voca[n]t. I was quite puzzled by this myself, but one of my Latinist friends figured it out right away: these words were abbreviated.

However, this didn’t explain why the abbreviation marks — called tituli (sing. titulus) in Latin — also seemed to be missing! Here’s the explanation. (This was another peculiarity of Mercator’s wild flourising.)

The Latin titulus evolved into the modern tilde, used in Spanish and Portuguese, as explained below:

“A tilde is a diacritical mark (˜) placed over the letter n in Spanish to indicate the palatal nasal sound somewhat like /ny/, as in cañon, ‘canyon’ or over a vowel in Portuguese to indicate nasalization, as in lã, ‘wool’ or pão, ‘bread.’

“The tilde originated as a mark of abbreviation used by medieval European scribes, most often writing in Latin. When scribes wanted to save space or had come to the end of a line without finishing a word, they omitted the final letter of the word and drew a line above the letter after which the letter was omitted. In Latin, this sign of abbreviation was called a titulus, meaning ‘superscription, something written above or outside something else.’ The device was especially used to abbreviate Latin words ending in the consonants n or m. A Latin word like aurum, ‘gold,’ could be abbreviated as aurū, for example, and many scribes also used a curved version of the titulus, as in aurũ. The titulus could also be used within words.”

[From: Spanish Word Histories and Mysteries: English Words That Come from Spanish; page 206. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.]