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I ask this under the assumption that "M-F" and "M~F" are the most commonly preferred notations for abbreviation weekday schedules if using 3-letter abbreviations like "Mon" and "Fri" take up too much space.

Alternatives that I can think of include:

MTWTF

and

MTWRF

I wonder what is most commonly used, the hyphen or tilde. It's difficult to perform a Google search to count the number of results because it doesn't seem like Google Search can search up punctuation marks.

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  • Where have you seen a tilde?
    – Jim
    Commented Sep 25, 2022 at 22:38

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In English, tilde isn't used to represent a range. A dash (specifically an en dash) is used in ranges of years, so would be appropriate here.

Informally, and as we don't have dashes on our keyboards, the hyphen-minus sign is a common and easy option. For historical reasons one symbol serves for both in many cases, but the hyphen and the minus sign aren't the same.

A tilde is sometimes used to indicate approximation in English text, but in some other languages it's used instead of ± (and sometimes makes its way into English as a result).

Mon-Fri is probably the most common compact way of expressing the range you want (I used a hyphen-minus there) but M-F is certainly seen. Your MTWRF looks like a typo but it can't be because you present it as different to MTWTF. That's one to avoid.

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    Some places use R for Thursday [and N for Sunday] in order to have single-letter representations for all the days of the week. But of course don't use it unless you are in one of those places.
    – GEdgar
    Commented Sep 25, 2022 at 20:41
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    @GEdgar don't use it unless you and all your readers are in such a place.
    – Chris H
    Commented Sep 26, 2022 at 5:44
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    Mon-Fri is best. We never use the tilde.
    – Maths Barry
    Commented Sep 26, 2022 at 11:15

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