You’re typing away, minding your own business, and then you see it. Tucked between the Control and Alt keys, or maybe hovering above the Enter key, sits a weird little squiggle or a geometric shape you’ve never intentionally pressed in your life. We all know the letters. We all know the numbers. But what is this symbol on keyboard layouts that seems to serve no purpose other than taking up space?
It’s actually a funny thing about human-computer interaction. We use these machines for eight hours a day, yet most of us are essentially "keyboard illiterate" when it comes to about 15% of the plastic squares under our fingertips.
Honestly, some of these symbols are holdovers from the days of mechanical typewriters or massive mainframes that filled entire rooms. Others are relics of the early 1990s when Microsoft and Apple were fighting a literal war for your desk space. If you've ever stared at the "hamburger" looking thing or the weird "clover" and wondered if your computer was secretly judging you for not knowing what it does, you aren't alone.
The Mystery of the Tilde and the Backtick
Let's start with the one that looks like a little floating mustache. It’s officially called the Tilde (~). On a standard US QWERTY keyboard, it lives in the top-left corner, usually sharing a home with the Backtick (`), also known as a grave accent.
In the world of linguistics, the tilde is a diacritic mark. It tells you how to pronounce a letter in Spanish or Portuguese. But why is it on an English keyboard? Because in the early days of computing, programmers needed a way to represent "approximately" or to signify a home directory in Unix-based systems. If you're a gamer, that key is probably your best friend—it’s the universal "open the console and type cheats" button.
Then there's the backtick. It’s not an apostrophe. Don't use it as one. If you’re a coder, specifically in JavaScript, you know it’s used for template literals. For everyone else, it’s mostly just the thing you hit by accident when you’re trying to type the number 1.
The Pipe Symbol: That Vertical Line Nobody Mentions
If you look right above the Enter key, you’ll see a vertical line that’s usually broken in the middle. That is the Pipe (|).
If you ask a normal person what is this symbol on keyboard meant for, they’ll probably guess it’s a weird l. It isn't. It’s a "pipe," and its history is deeply technical. Back in the 1970s, developers working on the Unix operating system needed a way to send the output of one program directly into the input of another. They called it "piping."
Think of it like a plumbing system for data. Today, it’s mostly used by power users in terminal commands or by math nerds to represent absolute value. In regular writing? It has almost no use, which is why it’s one of the most mysterious keys on the board.
The "Hamburger" or Menu Key
Windows keyboards often have a key that looks like a tiny document with a mouse pointer on it, or sometimes just three horizontal lines. This is the Menu Key.
Its job is incredibly simple: it does exactly what a right-click does.
Why does it exist? Accessibility. Back before every mouse had two buttons and a scroll wheel, navigating a graphical interface with just a keyboard was a nightmare. The Menu Key let you pull up context menus without needing a mouse at all. It’s a legacy feature that persists because removing it would annoy a very specific group of IT professionals and power users who hate taking their hands off the home row.
The Apple Command Symbol: The Saint John’s Arms
If you use a Mac, you’ve seen the "cloverleaf" symbol (⌘). It’s officially called the Command Key, but its design has a weirdly specific history.
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Originally, Apple used the Apple logo for this key. Steve Jobs, however, felt that putting the Apple logo on every single shortcut menu was "overusing" the brand. He told his team to find a new symbol. Susan Kare, the legendary icon designer, went through a book of symbols and found the "Saint John's Arms," which in Nordic countries marks a place of interest or a campground.
So, every time you hit Command+C to copy something, you’re technically pressing the international symbol for a Swedish tourist attraction.
The Caret: More Than Just a Little Hat
The symbol above the number 6 is the Caret (^). In proofreading, it’s used to show where something needs to be inserted. In computing, it’s often used to represent the Control key in shorthand (like ^C for Ctrl+C).
But most people encounter it in math or Excel. It’s the symbol for "to the power of." $5^2$ is written as 5^2 in a spreadsheet. It’s a tiny, sharp little tool that does a lot of heavy lifting in data science and logic, yet it remains largely anonymous to the average person writing an email.
The Octothorpe: Before It Was a Hashtag
We call it the hashtag now. Some people call it the pound sign. But its real name is the Octothorpe.
The name was reportedly coined by engineers at Bell Labs in the 1960s. They needed a name for the symbol on the new touch-tone phones. "Octo" refers to the eight points, and "thorpe" is... well, nobody is quite sure. Some say it was named after athlete Jim Thorpe. Others think it’s just a nonsense word.
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Before it took over Twitter and Instagram, it was primarily a symbol for weight (pounds) or a number indicator. Now, it's the most powerful metadata tool on the planet.
Why Do These Symbols Still Exist?
You might wonder why, in 2026, we are still using keyboard layouts designed for 19th-century mechanical typewriters. The QWERTY layout itself was designed to slow down typists so the metal arms of the typewriter wouldn't jam.
The symbols stayed because of "code persistence." Millions of lines of software are written using these specific characters as triggers. If we removed the Tilde or the Pipe, we’d break the fundamental language of the internet. We are stuck with them. They are the "vestigial organs" of the digital age—like an appendix, but for your laptop.
Using Symbols to Your Advantage
Knowing what is this symbol on keyboard hardware isn't just about trivia. It can actually make you faster.
- Ctrl + [Backtick]: In many apps, this toggles between different windows of the same program.
- Shift + [Any Symbol]: Most people know this, but few realize that the symbols are grouped by "logic" (like brackets and braces being near each other).
- Alt Codes: If you hold the Alt key and type a specific number on the Numpad, you can create symbols that aren't even on the keyboard, like the degree symbol (°) or the copyright symbol (©).
The keyboard is a dense map of history. Every key has a reason for being there, even if that reason hasn't been relevant since the Nixon administration. The next time you see that weird "Pipe" or the "Octothorpe," remember that you're looking at a piece of engineering history that survived the transition from paper to pixels.
Actionable Insights for Keyboard Mastery
- Stop Right-Clicking: Start using the Menu Key (between the Right Alt and Ctrl) to speed up your workflow in Excel or Word. It opens the context menu exactly where your cursor is.
- Use the Tilde for File Paths: If you ever have to use a command line, remember that
~is the fastest way to get back to your user folder. - Learn Your Brackets: There is a difference between parentheses
(), square brackets[], and curly braces{}. Square brackets are for arrays and citations; curly braces are for code blocks and sets. Using them correctly makes your professional writing look significantly more polished. - Check Your Keyboard Language: If your symbols aren't matching what's printed on the keys, your computer probably thinks you're in the UK or another region. Hit Win + Space to quickly cycle back to the correct layout.
The hardware in front of you is more capable than you think. Don't let the "weird keys" intimidate you—they're just tools waiting for you to learn their names.