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The ellipsis (, plural ellipses; from , élleipsis, ), rendered , also known as suspension points dots, points periods of ellipsis, or ellipsis points, or colloquialism, dot-dot-dot,. According to Toner it is difficult to establish when the "dot dot dot" phrase was first used. There is an early instance, which is perhaps the first in a piece of fiction, in Virginia Woolf's short story "An Unwritten Novel" (1920).Source for suspension: is a punctuation mark consisting of a series of three dots. An ellipsis can be used in many ways, such as for intentional omission of text or numbers, to imply a concept without using words, or to mark a pause in speech. Style guides differ on how to render an ellipsis both digitally and in print. In some cases, an ellipsis may have four or more dots, spaced dots, or some incorporation with other punctuation.
When text is omitted following a sentence, a period (full stop) terminates the sentence, and a subsequent ellipsis indicates one or more omitted sentences before continuing a longer quotation. Business Insider magazine suggests this style and it is also used in many . The Associated Press Stylebook favors this approach.
When a sentence ends with ellipsis, some style guides indicate there should be four dots; three for ellipsis and a period. Chicago advises it, The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition (2017), §13.51–52. as does the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style),Summarized here: while some other style guides do not; the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and related works treat this style as optional, saying that it "may" be used.
The popularity of the ellipsis took off after Kyffin's usage; containing three examples in his 1588 translation of Andria, by the 1627 translation of the same play there were 29 examples of its usage. They appear in William Shakespeare's plays in addition to Ben Jonson's. In 1634, John Barton, an English schoolmaster, wrote in The Art of Rhetorick that "eclipsis" is much used in playbooks “where they are noted thus ---”. In the first folio edition of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Toner writes, "Hotspur dies on a dash", with his last words cut short.
Different types of ellipsis faced opposition. In the 18th-century, Jonathan Swift rhymed "dash" with "printed trash", while Henry Fielding chose the name 'Dash' for an unlikeable character in his 1730 play The Author's Farce. It has also been championed by writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. According to Toner, an early example of the dot dot dot phrase is in Woolf's short story "An Unwritten Novel" (1920).
Occasionally, it would be used in Pulp magazine and other works of early 20th-century fiction to denote expletives that would otherwise have been censored.Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane. Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels. First Edition. New York: Library of America. 1995. Note on the Texts.
An ellipsis may also imply an unstated alternative indicated by context. For example, "I never drink wine ..." implies that the speaker does drink something elsesuch as vodka.
In reported speech, the ellipsis can be used to represent an intentional silence.
In poetry, an ellipsis is used as a thought-pause or line break at the caesura or this is used to highlight sarcasm or make the reader think about the last points in the poem.
In news reporting, often put inside square brackets, it is used to indicate that a quotation has been condensed for space, brevity or relevance, as in "The President said that ... he would not be satisfied", where the exact quotation was "The President said that, for as long as this situation continued, he would not be satisfied".
Herb Caen, Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, became famous for his "three-dot journalism". `HERB CAEN WAY . . .' HONORS S.F. COLUMNIST , in the Deseret News; published May 29, 1996; retrieved September 5, 2017
Depending on context, ellipsis can indicate an unfinished thought, a leading statement, a slight Pausa, an echoing voice, or a nervous or awkward silence. Aposiopesis is the use of an ellipsis to trail off into silence—for example: "But I thought he was..." When placed at the end of a sentence, an ellipsis may be used to suggest melancholy or longing.
In newspaper and magazine columns, ellipses may separate items of a list instead of paragraph breaks.
Merriam-Webster's Manual for Writers and Editors uses a line of ellipsis to indicate omission of whole lines in a quoted poem.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) used to indicate that an ellipsis must include spaces before and after each dot in all uses. If an ellipsis is meant to represent an omission, must surround the ellipsis to make it clear that there was no pause in the original quote: . Currently, the MLA has removed the requirement of brackets in its style handbooks. However, some maintain that the use of brackets is still correct because it clears confusion.Fowler, H. Ramsey, Jane E. Aaron, Murray McArthur. The Little, Brown Handbook. Fourth Canadian Edition. Toronto: Longman. 2005. p. 440.
The MLA now indicates that a three-dot, spaced ellipsis should be used for removing material from within one sentence within a quote. When crossing sentences (when the omitted text contains a period, so that omitting the end of a sentence counts), a four-dot, spaced (except for before the first dot) ellipsis should be used. When ellipsis points are used in the original text, ellipsis points that are not in the original text should be distinguished by enclosing them in square brackets (e.g. ).
According to the Associated Press, the ellipsis should be used to condense quotations. It is less commonly used to indicate a pause in speech or an unfinished thought or to separate items in material such as show business gossip. The stylebook indicates that if the shortened sentence before the mark can stand as a sentence, it should do so, with an ellipsis placed after the period or other ending punctuation. When material is omitted at the end of a paragraph and also immediately following it, an ellipsis goes both at the end of that paragraph and at the beginning of the next, according to this style.Goldstein, Norm, editor. "Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law". 2005. pp.328–329.
According to Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style, the details of typesetting ellipses depend on the character and size of the font being set and the typographer's preference. Bringhurst writes that a full space between each dot is "another Victorian eccentricity. In most contexts, the Chicago ellipsis is much too wide"—he recommends using flush dots (with a normal word space before and after), or thin space dots (up to one-fifth of an em), or the prefabricated ellipsis character . Bringhurst suggests that normally an ellipsis should be spaced fore-and-aft to separate it from the text, but when it combines with other punctuation, the leading space disappears and the other punctuation follows. This is the usual practice in typesetting. He provides the following examples:
In legal writing in the United States, Rule 5.3 in the Bluebook citation guide governs the use of ellipses and requires a space before the first dot and between the two subsequent dots. If an ellipsis ends the sentence, then there are three dots, each separated by a space, followed by the final punctuation (e.g. ). In some legal writing, an ellipsis is written as three , or , to make it obvious that text has been omitted or to signal that the omitted text extends beyond the end of the paragraph.
The ... fox jumps ... The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. ... And if they have not died, they are still alive today. It is not cold ... it is freezing cold.
Contrary to The Oxford Style Guide, the University of Oxford Style Guide demands an ellipsis not to be surrounded by spaces, except when it stands for a pause; then, a space has to be set after the ellipsis (but not before), and it states that an ellipsis should never be preceded or followed by a full stop.
The...fox jumps... The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog...And if they have not died, they are still alive today. It is not cold... it is freezing cold.
In text in Japanese media, such as in manga or video games, ellipses are much more frequent than in English, and are often changed to another punctuation sign in translation. The ellipsis by itself represents speechlessness, or a "pregnant pause". Depending on the context, this could be anything from an admission of guilt to an expression of being dumbfounded at another person's words or actions. As a device, the ten-ten-ten is intended to focus the reader on a character while allowing the character to not speak any dialogue. This conveys to the reader a focus of the narrative "camera" on the silent subject, implying an expectation of some motion or action. It is not unheard of to see inanimate objects "speaking" the ellipsis.
Other use is the suspension of a part of a text, or a paragraph, or a phrase or a part of a word because it is obvious, or unnecessary, or implied. For instance, sometimes the ellipsis is used to avoid the complete use of expletives.
When the ellipsis is placed alone into a Bracket (...) or—less often—between ..., which is what happens usually within a text transcription, it means the original text had more contents on the same position but are not useful to our target in the transcription. When the suppressed text is at the beginning or at the end of a text, the ellipsis does not need to be placed in a parenthesis.
The number of dots is three and only three. They should have no space in between them nor with the preceding word, but there should be a space with the following word (except if they are followed by a punctuation sign, such as a comma).
Example for both cases, using German style: The first el...is stands for omitted letters, the second ... for an omitted word.
If the ellipsis is at the end of a sentence, the final full stop is omitted.
Example: I think that ...
The whole numbers from 1 to 100 can be shown as:
The positive whole numbers, an infinite list, can be shown as:
To indicate omitted terms in a repeated operation, an ellipsis is sometimes raised from the baseline, as:
But, this raised formatting is not standard. For example, Russian mathematical texts use the baseline format.Мильчин А. Э. Издательский словарь-справочник .— Изд. 3-е, испр. и доп., Электронное — М.: ОЛМА-Пресс, 2006. (in Russian)
The ellipsis is not a formally defined mathematical symbol. Repeated summations or products may be more formally denoted using capital sigma and capital pi notation, respectively:
Ellipsis is sometimes used where the pattern is not clear. For example, indicating the indefinite continuation of an irrational number such as:
It can be useful to display an expression compactly, for example:
In set notation, the ellipsis is used as horizontal, vertical and diagonal for indicating missing matrix terms, such as the size- n identity matrix:
The CSS text-overflow property can be set to ellipsis, which cuts off text with an ellipsis when it overflows the content area.
Similar functionality may be accessible via a button with a hamburger icon ( ≡) or a narrow version called the kebab icon which is a vertical ellipsis ( ).
For example, the menu item "Save" overwrites an existing file whereas "Save as..." prompts the user for save options before saving.
Sometimes progress is animated with an ellipse-like construct of repeatedly adding dots to a label in a manner similar to a progress bar.
Although an ellipsis is complete with three periods (...), an ellipsis-like construct with more dots is used to indicate "trailing-off" or "silence". The extent of repetition in itself might serve as an additional contextualization or paralinguistic cue; one paper wrote that they "extend the lexical meaning of the words, add character to the sentences, and allow fine-tuning and personalisation of the message".
While composing a text message, some environments show others in the conversation a typing awareness indicator ellipsis to indicate remote activity.
Unicode recognizes a series of three full stop characters () as compatibility equivalent (though not canonical) to the horizontal ellipsis character.
| Lower ellipsis | \ldots | |
| Centred ellipsis | \cdots | |
| Diagonal ellipsis | \ddots | |
| Vertical ellipsis | \vdots |
In LaTeX, the reverse orientation of \ddots can be achieved with \reflectbox provided by the graphicx package: \reflectbox{\ddots} yields .
With the amsmath package from AMS-Latex, more specific ellipses are provided for math mode. User's Guide for the amsmath Package. American Mathematical Society, 1999, p. 12.
Note that ISO/IEC 8859 encoding series provides no code point for ellipsis.
As with all characters, especially those outside the ASCII range, the author, sender and receiver of an encoded ellipsis must be in agreement upon what bytes are being used to represent the character. Naive text processing software may improperly assume that a particular encoding is being used, resulting in mojibake.
In macOS, it can be inserted with (on an English language keyboard).
In some Linux distributions, it can be inserted with (this produces an interpunct on other systems), or .
In Android, ellipsis is a long-press key. If Gboard is in alphanumeric layout, change to numeric and special characters layout by pressing from alphanumeric layout. Once in numeric and special characters layout, long press key to insert an ellipsis.
In Chinese language and sometimes in Japanese, ellipsis characters are made by entering two consecutive horizontal ellipses, each with Unicode code point U+2026. In vertical texts, the application should rotate the symbol accordingly.
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