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How do you pronounce tildes?
Hi all, loving the site so far - big ‘old forums’ vibes here which is amazing!
I was telling a friend about tildes last night and I said ‘yeah this tildeee’s……tildas, til-dess?? Place is cool!’
I’m guessing it’s Till-dsss? Cheers 🫡
edit: Nice - came up from a coffee and morning chores and 5 posts, great to be here. No automatic auto-mod in sight. :P
I think tilde is usually pronounced "till-duh", so I've been pronouncing tildes as "till-duhs".
That's just my best guess though.
That's correct. It's pronounced "till-duh"
The little squiggly line "~" is a punctuation mark that communicates approximation.
loving the forum vibes too.
i was pronouncing it "tildees" but after seeing this question i went to look how the singular tilde is pronounced and apparently it's pronounced "tilda"
so i'm going to call this place"Tildas"
shoot i was going Tildees as well.
No, it's everyone else who's wrong.
I'm English/British and I pronounce it like "tillds". As in ryhmes with "guilds".
Yeah that's probably what i'm gonna rest on too [as a fellow Brit!]
I always pronounced ~ as til-day, so I say til-days. I think I'm wrong but my brain broke for that one at a young age and it's far too late to fix it.
Same and I should know better because my last name has a tilde in it. Its like how I can’t unsee the Disney logo’s “D” as some weird stylized “G”, even though I know better.
Yeah, I've always seen it as a G. As a kid I was like "why do they pronounce Gisney so weird", and never really got over it.
ha it sounds like you and me are the same kind of weird ;)
Yep me to
Yeah, I believe quite a few people have been wondering the same thing, you're not alone haha.
According to wiktionary.org the plural of tilde(~), tildes, is pronounced either
/ˈtɪl.dɛz/
(With the ɛ sounding like dress, prestige, length),
or /ˈtɪl.dəz/
(With the ə sounding like comma, abbot, bazaar).
So I guess that's the official pronounciation. Then again, maybe the creator of this site had another pronounciation in mind. Perhaps if a lot of people are wondering the same thing he might clear it up one day lol.
This is far from the first time this question has been asked, and I don't recall Deimos ever giving an answer. He has just let us all flail about with our differing pronunciations.
It's pronounced "jildes"
Originally, didn't it have something to do with fans of Tilda Swainton? I always pronounced it til-deez, like it originally was meant as a cute name for members of her fanclub
Ha interesting, I do like Tilda Swinton's work, so that'd be a pretty funny origin of the name.
I read in the Tildes Docs that the idea for the name came from the tildes symbol (~) being a waveform:
That makes way more sense. I don't even remember now how the Tilda Swainton notion first arose. It may have been a joke I read in some thread somehwere and I took it out of context. Alas, I tend to scroll too much and can't keep track of how things get lodged in my subconscious
It was a joke by some people back in the early days, based on the similarity between the words "Tildes" and "Tilda". But some people liked to use it. (I found this example and this example.)
There were/are quite a few jokey names around for Tildes users, and everyone had their favourite and insisted on using it. Some people are still using some of them.
Thank you for bringing the IPA, I was going to do just that. I pronounce it like the first example.
Fun fact: in Spanish this sign [~] is called
virgulilla, and I, being a native Spanish speaker since forever, didn't know that all this time. If this site ever gets a Spanish community, don't let them translate the site's name. Seriously.In English (at least in my part of the US), it’s Til-deez. It’s this character: ~
Though I’ve also heard people say “Tilduh.”
My brain will never not say "Til-deez nuts", so it's "Til-duhs" for me.
I think this is about the third or fourth time in the past week that I've seen this question in various places on Tildes (I don't know where all the instances were, so I can't track them down for you, sorry - but here was one of them.
I pronounced "tildes" with one syllable: "tildz". For me, it rhymes with "builds".
I sort of know, in the back of my head, that the word "tilde" has two syllables ("til-duh"), but somehow that didn't register when I first saw the name "Tildes". From that very first instant, I've just mentally pronounced it with one syllable. I've even mentioned this site to a couple of real-life people, and I've said it as "tildz" in those conversations.
Since getting involved in the early discussions here about a name for the people on Tildes, I've personally settled on "Tilders", which definitely has two syllables. So, that's more incentive for me to keep "Tildes" pronounced with one syllable, to stop it being a homophone for "Tilders" - because Aussie English doesn't hit that last "r" in "Tilders" the same way that North American English does. For me, a two-syllable "Tildes" and the word "Tilders" would be said nearly the same. So, I keep "Tildes" with one syllable, leaving "Tilders" to hold the two-syllable spot in my mental vocabulary: rhyming with "builds" and "builders".
When I first moved to Australia (I'm from the US originally), I remember getting very confused one time while talking to my boyfriend, who is Australian, because I couldn't tell if he was saying "dances" or "dancers". That's when he himself realized that he pronounces them the same way.
For any Americans here confused about how an Australian says "Tilders", it's basically the same way that you would say "tildas".
I pronounce it the same way and agree with your thoughts on the denonym for tildes users.
I had no idea tilde was pronounced with two syllables. I've never spoke the word or heard it spoken, I've only ever read it, so it's always been pronounced with one syllable in my head and that's unlikely to change.
Been here for years and never actually said the name out loud. I’d say it’s pronounced like the keyboard character, so til-des (as in destination).
Also, to everyone else in this thread: https://giphy.com/gifs/molly-welker-F3G8ymQkOkbII
As a native Spanish speaker I can't help but to pronounce it in Spanish.
A quick Google search says the "character came into English from Spanish" (we'll ignore the part where it says the Spanish came from the Latin titulus ;)), so I'll hold my ground and say I'm the one pronouncing it correctly haha.
You can find community answer to that and more! on this thread
Link to the discussion in that post. Doesn't seem to be an official consensus there either.
Hey :3 New here too. Need to fill out my bio...
Depending on the state of my brain. “Till-dess” when I’m in German mode, “Till-dees” when I’m in American mode :D
Funny, I call it Till-dess in American mode, and I have no other mode lol.
Usually, for where I’m from, it would be [tɪlˈdəz], but I personally say [tɪlˈdiz].
I cannot help but pronounce it as CHEEU-jees / 'tʃiudʒis as that is how it would be if it was a word in my dialect of Portuguese. …Also because I never learned how to pronounce tilde in English. It's just called til (CHIU / 'tʃiu) in PT.
As if you had tilled something but say everything plurally: "tilleds"
Is it "tilduh" for the ~?
Til-day.
Which is my completely unaccented version of the Spanish pronunciation I learned in high school.
I pronounce it "new reddit". ;-)