Ellipsis

An ellipsis can be used in many ways, such as for intentional omission of text or numbers, to imply a concept without using words.

According to The Chicago Manual of Style, it should consist of three periods, each separated from its neighbor by a non-breaking space: .

[5] According to the AP Stylebook, the periods should be rendered with no space between them: ....[6] A third option – available in electronic text – is to use the precomposed character U+2026 … HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS.

[15] 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 ---”.

[15] 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.

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.

[15] It has also been championed by writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

In poetry, an ellipsis is used as a thought-pause or line break at the caesura[17] or this is used to highlight sarcasm or make the reader think about the last points in the poem.

Herb Caen, Pulitzer-prize-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, became famous for his "three-dot journalism".

[18] Depending on context, ellipsis can indicate an unfinished thought, a leading statement, a slight pause, an echoing voice, or a nervous or awkward silence.

[19] In newspaper and magazine columns, ellipses may separate items of a list instead of paragraph breaks.

[2]: 147 The Chicago Manual of Style suggests the use of an ellipsis for any omitted word, phrase, line, or paragraph from within but not at the end of a quoted passage.

The Chicago Style Q&A recommends that writers avoid using the precomposed … (U+2026) character in manuscripts and to place three periods plus two nonbreaking spaces (. . .)

[20] The Modern Language Association (MLA) used to indicate that an ellipsis must include spaces before and after each dot in all uses.

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.

If an ellipsis ends the sentence, then there are three dots, each separated by a space, followed by the final punctuation (e.g. Hah .

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog...And if they have not died, they are still alive today.

The word wielokropek distinguishes the ellipsis of Polish syntax from that of mathematical notation, in which it is known as an elipsa.

[27][28] 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.

This conveys to the reader a focus of the narrative "camera" on the silent subject, implying an expectation of some motion or action.

However, any omitted word, phrase or line at the end of a quoted passage would be indicated as follows: [...] (space before and after the square brackets but not inside), for example: ... à Paris, Nice, Nantes, Toulouse [...].

The Accademia della Crusca suggests the use of an ellipsis ("puntini di sospensione") to indicate a pause longer than a period and, when placed between brackets, the omission of letters, words or phrases.

[34] "Tra le cose più preziose possedute da Andrea Sperelli era una coperta di seta fina, d'un colore azzurro disfatto, intorno a cui giravano i dodici segni dello Zodiaco in ricamo, con le denominazioni […] a caratteri gotici."

[37][38] An ellipsis is sometimes used as the label for a button to access user interface that has been omitted – probably due to space limitations – particularly in mobile apps running on small screen devices.

According to some style guides, a menu item or button labeled with a trailing ellipsis requests an operation that cannot be completed without additional information and selecting it will prompt the user for input.

[44] 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".

In the TeX typesetting system, the following types of ellipsis are available: In LaTeX, the reverse orientation of \ddots can be achieved with \reflectbox provided by the graphicx package: \reflectbox{\ddots} yields .

Naive text processing software may improperly assume that a particular encoding is being used, resulting in mojibake.

In Windows using a suitable code page, U+2026 … HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS can be inserted with Alt+0133, using the numeric keypad.

In Chinese and sometimes in Japanese, ellipsis characters are made by entering two consecutive horizontal ellipses, each with Unicode code point U+2026.