[WalterGR]

Going to my home dir is another frequent operation for me so I also have

  alias ~='pushd ~'

(Those are tildes but may look like dashes depending on your font and size...)

Not as fancy as some other aliases I see here but does the (basic) trick.

[stevekemp]

A raw "cd" with no arguments will take you back to your home-directory. Of course "~" is one less character to type, but on the off-chance you didn't know.

[JNRowe]

As we're offering alternatives. Either `shopt autocd` in bash or `setopt auto_cd` in zsh, then ~ changes to home by simply being a path.