How Can I Expand A Tilde ~ As Part Of A Variable?

When I open up a bash prompt and type: $ set -o xtrace $ x='~/someDirectory' + x='~/someDirectory' $ echo $x + echo '~/someDirectory' ~/someDirectory I was hoping that the 5th line above would have went + echo /home/myUsername/someDirectory. Is there a way to do this? In my original Bash script, the variable x is actually being populated from data from an input file, via a loop like this: while IFS= read line do params=($line) echo ${params} done <"./someInputFile.txt" Still, I'm getting a similar result, with the echo '~/someDirectory' instead of echo /home/myUsername/someDirectory.