Almost exclusively for “approximately”, and fairly frequently at that.
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually used the grave itself, and until this thread couldn’t have told you its name. Maybe for a paper in my college poetry class.
I normally would call it tilde, but grave wouldn’t sound weird either. It is both the grave and the tilde key. I think tilde is probably more common because outside of certain people who use specialty programs I think the tilde is actually more used than the grave, so that is probably why the shifted key became the more prominent.
The ? key is also probably called the question mark key and the / key interchangeably. I know when I want to type a ? I think of it as the ? key and not the shifted / key.
It’s not really a tilde because you can’t put it above any letters (yeah, I know it’s evolved to mean other things, but that’s what it means to me). I call it the “approximately” symbol.
I don’t use the other one, so I don’t call it anything.
Grave is a one-syllable word, in French and English.
I don’t think it’s ambiguous. Key combinations always include the shift. Control-A does not mean Control-Shift-a, and press the Z key does not mean press Shift-z. If you really think you need to disambiguate, just say “no shift” or “by itself.”
You can if you set your keyboard to US-International. It becomes a dead key, along with "/’.
Eyebrow and mustache.
Seriously? Do you have one of those things they called a “typewriter” or something? How do you connect it to the internets?
I don’t really call it anything, mainly because I have never had it come up in conversation, but I think of it as an approximate symbol (which is what I mainly use it for).
My current keyboard does not have such a key, but when I had one that did I did not call it anything. Why do keys need names? If I wanted to tell someone to type one or other of those symbols (or that I had typed one or other of them), I would refer to the symbol, not the key, and I would try to use the term that they would be most likely to understand. I take it that the nearest to “correct” terms for those symbols would be “grave” (grahv) and “tilde,” but they might not be the most widely understood.
Well of course, but that’s just a nuisance, when you can simply program a macro for alt-n to do it one stroke.
The “squiggle key”, so I voted “squiggly”.
Yeah I know, I looked it up. I must have heard it wrong years ago and the mispronunciation stuck. I don’t say it often enough to be embarrassed by it. I suppose it’s safer to just call it the tilde key from now on, though.
I can’t believe how many of you thought you could not put a symbol over a letter! I guess some of us type Spanish (or other non-English) words more than others.
I think you’re missing the point of the joke.
Of course we use these Spanish symbols all the time (in California, at least). The joke is that, when I was a boy, and people still used typewriters, you had to use the backspace key, and physically type a second time in the same place.
Having taught classes in Adobe Illustrator, the books all refer to it as the Tilde key.
There are actually a few cool tricks you can do with that key in Illustrator.
I’m not sure I have ever actually referred to it. but if I was going to, I would probably call it the tilde key.
“grave/tilde”? The grave is primary, ostensibly, though I may use the tilde more.
And yes, “grahv till-deh.”
Pretty much this.
Similarly, I came in to say that although I know that the squiggle is called a tilde and even use them on occasion, I have never in all my years had occasion to refer to the key in any manner.
Tilde for me.
I’m more likely to refer to the question mark key than the slash key, and ditto for the PrintScreen and Pause keys.