When you open an Office document, a small hidden file is created in the directory. It's named the same as the document, but with ~$ overwriting the first two characters. One might wonder why the Office programs bother doing that.
The answer, as included in this old Microsoft article, is that these little files are there so Office can tell you who's responsible for the file being in use. When a document is opened, Office notes the current user's display name into this file. When another Office instance tries to open the file but receives an error that the file is in use, it looks in the squiggly dollar file to report the human-readable name of the person who's holding the lock.
The advantage of knowing that fact is that users in an office trying to edit a file on a network share can go to the specific person and ask them to maybe finish working with the document.
Based on my Super User answer.
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