Ñ

Ñ or ñ (Spanish: eñe [ˈeɲe] ^ⓘ) is a letter of the extended Latin alphabet, formed by placing a tilde (also referred to as a virgulilla in Spanish, in order to differentiate it from other diacritics, which are also called tildes) on top of an upper- or lower-case ⟨n⟩. The origin dates back to medieval Spanish, when the Latin digraph ⟨nn⟩ began to be abbreviated using a single ⟨n⟩ with a roughly wavy line above it, and it eventually became part of the Spanish alphabet in the eighteenth century, when it was first formally defined.

Since then, it has been adopted by other languages, such as Galician, Asturian, the Aragonese, Basque, Chavacano, several Philippine languages (especially Filipino and the Bisayan group), Chamorro, Guarani, Quechua, Mapudungun, Mandinka, Papiamento, and the Tetum. It also appears in the Latin transliteration of Tocharian and many Indian languages, where it represents [ɲ] or [nʲ] (similar to the ⟨ny⟩ in canyon). Additionally, it was adopted in Crimean Tatar, Kazakh, ALA-LC romanization for Turkic languages, the Common Turkic Alphabet, Nauruan, and romanized Quenya, where it represents the phoneme [ŋ] (like the ⟨ng⟩ in wing). It has also been adopted in both Breton and Rohingya, where it indicates the nasalization of the preceding vowel.

Unlike many other letters that use diacritics (such as ⟨ü⟩ in Catalan and Spanish and ⟨ç⟩ in Catalan), ⟨ñ⟩ in Spanish, Galician, Basque, Asturian, Leonese, Guarani and Filipino is considered a letter in its own right, has its own name (Spanish: eñe), and its own place in the alphabet (after ⟨n⟩). Its alphabetical independence is similar to the Germanic ⟨w⟩, which came from a doubled ⟨v⟩.

Historically, ⟨ñ⟩ arose as a ligature of ⟨nn⟩; the tilde was shorthand for the second ⟨n⟩, written over the first; compare umlaut, of analogous origin. It is a letter in the Spanish alphabet that is used for many words—for example, the Spanish word año "year" (⟨anno⟩ in Old Spanish) derived from Latin: annus. Other languages used the macron over an ⟨n⟩ or ⟨m⟩ to indicate simple doubling.

Already in medieval Latin palaeography, the sign that in Spanish came to be called virgulilla ("little comma") was used over a vowel to indicate a following nasal consonant (⟨n⟩ or ⟨m⟩) that had been omitted, as in tãtus for tantus or quã for quam. This usage was passed on to other languages using the Latin alphabet although it was subsequently dropped by most. Spanish retained it, however, in some specific cases, particularly to indicate the palatal nasal, the sound that is now spelt as ⟨ñ⟩. The word tilde comes from Spanish, derived by metathesis of the word título as tidlo, this originally from Latin TITVLVS "title" or "heading"; compare cabildo with Latin CAPITULUM.

From spellings of anno abbreviated as año, as explained above, the tilde was thenceforth transferred to the ⟨n⟩ and kept as a useful expedient to indicate the new palatal nasal sound that Spanish had developed in that position: año. The sign was also adopted for the same palatal nasal in all other cases, even when it did not derive from an original ⟨nn⟩, as in leña (from Latin ligna) or señor (from Latin SENIOR).

Other Romance languages have different spellings for this sound: Italian and French use ⟨gn⟩, a consonant cluster that had evolved from Latin, whereas Occitan and Portuguese chose ⟨nh⟩ and Catalan ⟨ny⟩ even though these digraphs had no etymological precedent.

When Morse code was extended to cover languages other than English, a sequence ( — — · — — ) was allotted for this character.