~ probably means Home because of a keyboard coincidence

cd ~ takes you back to your home directory. But have you ever wondered why ~ (tilde) means "home"? The most widely accepted answer has no grand design philosophy behind it. It was a coincidence of keyboard layout.

In the 1970s, there was a terminal called the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A. On its keyboard, the ~ key and the Home key were printed on the same key. The usual explanation is that when programmers of that era picked a shortcut for the home directory, ~ was the natural association.

A label on a keyboard from 50 years ago still lives on in the fingers of engineers worldwide, and there's something romantic about that.