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| Punctuation marks |
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apostrophe (' ) |
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ampersand ( & ) |
In printing and writing, an ellipsis (plural: ellipses) is a row of three dots (…) or asterisks (* * *) indicating an intentional omission. This punctuation mark is also called a suspension point.
An example is, “She went to … school.” In this sentence, “…” might represent the word “elementary,” or the word “no.” The use of ellipses can either mislead or clarify, and the reader must rely on the good intentions of the writer who uses it. Omission without indication by an ellipsis is always considered misleading.
An ellipsis can also used to indicate a pause in speech, or be used at the end of a sentence to indicate a trailing off into silence.
There are differences in typographical rules and conventions of using ellipsis between languages.
The Chicago Manual of Style suggests the use of an ellipsis for any omitted word, phrase, line or paragraph from within a quoted passage. There are two commonly used methods of using ellipses: one uses three dots for any omission, the second makes a distinction between omissions within a sentence (using three dots: …) and omissions between sentences (using a period followed by three spaced dots: ...).
Although some write ellipses without spaces, some institutions, such as the Oxford University Press, place spaces before the ellipsis. Thus: “I have seen something ...” (instead of “I have seen something...”) The exception here is when a word has been cut off in the middle; that is, when the ellipsis stands for a part of one word: “‘He said he realised he was wro...’ I stopped mid-word, awestruck.” (In English it is often written as “‘He said he realised he was wro—’ I stopped mid-word, awestruck.”)
Sometimes 4 dots are used in an ellipsis, often to represent a period following an ellipsis.
When quoting, an ellipsis is used enclosed in brackets ([ ]) or, more often, slashes (//) if one wishes to omit a part of an original quotation. For example, if the original is the following: “I am reluctant, for no one has convinced me otherwise, to make this decision,” one may quote it by leaving out a part thus: “I am reluctant /.../ to make this decision.”
In Polish language ellipsis (called wielokropek which means multidot) is always composed of three dots without any spaces between. There is also no space between the ellipsis and the preceding word, but there is always a space after ellipsis, unless the next character is a closing bracket or quote mark, in which case the space is used after that character.
When the ellipsis is used while omitting a fragment of quotation, it is always surrounded with either square brackets or (more commonly) parentheses whith no space inside:
Those rules are standardized by PN-83/P-55366 standard from 1983, Setting rules from composing of Polish texts (Zasady składania tekstów w języku polskim).
Ellipsis without parentheses usually means a pause in speech:
It can also mean a word said partially and interrupted and in that case can be directly followed by another punctuation mark without space:
Ellipsis can be used at the end of a sentence, but it is always composed of three dots, never four, and the only difference is the capitalisation of the next word:
In Japanese manga, the ellipsis by itself represents speechlessness, usually as an admission of guilt or a response to being dumbfounded as a result of something that another person has just said or done. The growing popularity of manga worldwide has extended this convention beyond the borders of Japan.
The ellipsis is also often used in mathematics to mean “and so forth,” e.g.: “1; 2; 3; ...; 10” means “all natural numbers from 1 to 10.” However, it is not a formally defined mathematical symbol.
In computing, the ellipsis character in the Unicode encoding is encoded as hexadecimal 0x2026, which is displayed as “…”. The HTML character entity for it is … (for ‘horizontal ellipsis’).
In typography there are various types of ellipsis, which are displayed below using TeX; the diagonal and vertical forms are particularly useful for showning missing terms in matrices:
An ellipsis is also a rhetorical figure of speech, the omission of a word or words required by strict grammatical rules but not by sense. The missing words are implied by the context.
Typical examples of this are:
(This could also be explained without using ellipsis. “Created” is a past participle, which modifies the noun “encyclopedia” in the same manner as an adjective, ie “BambooWeb is the greatest created encyclopedia ever.”)
The aposiopesis is a form of ellipsis.
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