The ellipsis (, plural ellipses; from , , ), rendered , also known as suspension points, dots, periods of ellipsis, or ellipsis points, or, colloquially, dot, dot, dot 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 two, four or more dots, spaced dots, or some incorporation with other punctuation.
Style Opinions differ on how to render an ellipsis in printed material and are to some extent based on the technology used for rendering. According to The Chicago Manual of Style, it should consist of three periods, each separated from its neighbor by a non-breaking space: . According to the AP Stylebook, the periods should be rendered with no space between them: . A third option available in electronic text is to use the precomposed character .
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 academic journals. 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.
History
In her book on ellipsis, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission, Anne Toner's earliest example of the mark in English is from 1710, in a printing of the play Love for Love, where the convention had probably been borrowed from continental Europe:
For example, the mark was already in use in France by the 1630s (bracketed translation in the original):
According to Toner, "[t]he dash and ellipsis points . . . were originally equivalent versions of the same mark." "It [took] . . . centuries to accrue those meanings that separated it from a series of hyphens or a series of stars." "While we distinguish today between the trailing away of these ellipsis points . . . and the more abrupt interruption signalled by a dash, such specific tonal and durational cues have emerged slowly" Several examples can be found in Ellipsis in English Literature of early printed texts being set with where a dash was before, with no apparent intended change in meaning. In later works, the two symbols have acquired their own particular characteristic meanings.
"Subpuncting" of medieval manuscripts also denotes omitted meaning and may be related:
The ellipsis has been championed by writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.
According to Toner, it is difficult to establish when the "dot, dot, dot" phrase (meaning "etcetera") 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).
In writing Occasionally, it would be used in pulp fiction 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 pause, 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.
In different languages
In English
American English 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. There are two commonly used methods of using ellipses: one uses three dots for any omission, while the second one makes a distinction between omissions within a sentence (using three dots: . . .) and omissions between sentences (using a period and a space followed by three dots: . ...). The Chicago Style Q&A recommends that writers avoid using the precomposed character in manuscripts and to place three periods plus two non-breaking spaces (. . .) instead, leaving the editor, publisher, or typographer to replace them later.
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, square brackets 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: Pearson 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 pair of dots 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-spaced 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 that the dots be separated by (non-breaking) spaces. If an ellipsis ends the sentence, then there are three dots followed by the final punctuation, all space-separated, e.g. and . This is clearly distinct from an ellipsis following a sentence, e.g. and . In some legal writing, an ellipsis is written as three asterisks, or , to make it obvious that text has been omitted or to signal that the omitted text extends beyond the end of the paragraph.
British English The Oxford Style Guide recommends setting the ellipsis as a single character or as a series of three (narrow) spaced dots surrounded by spaces, thus: . If there is an ellipsis at the end of an incomplete sentence, the final full stop is omitted. However, it is retained if the following ellipsis represents an omission between two complete sentences.
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 (Oxford University Press's) The Oxford Style Guide, the University of Oxford Style Guide demands that an ellipsis not 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 Polish When applied in Polish syntax, the ellipsis is called , literally "multidot". The word wielokropek distinguishes the ellipsis of Polish syntax from that of mathematical notation, in which it is known as an . When an ellipsis replaces a fragment omitted from a quotation, the ellipsis is enclosed in parentheses or square brackets. An unbracketed ellipsis indicates an interruption or pause in speech. The syntactic rules for ellipses are standardized by the 1983 Polska Norma document PN-83/P-55366, (Rules for Setting Texts in Polish).
In Russian The combination "ellipsis+period" is replaced by the ellipsis. The combinations "ellipsis+exclamation mark" and "ellipsis+question mark" are written in this way: "!.. ?.."
In Japanese The most common character corresponding to an ellipsis is called san-ten rīdā ("3-dot leaders", ). Ni-ten rīdā with two dots exists as a character, but it is used less commonly. In writing, the ellipsis consists usually of six dots (two san-ten rīdā characters, ). Three dots (one san-ten rīdā character) may be used where space is limited, such as in a header. However, variations in the number of dots exist. In horizontally written text the dots are commonly vertically centered within the text height (between the baseline and the ascent line), as in the standard Japanese Windows fonts; in vertically written text the dots are always centered horizontally. As the Japanese word for dot is pronounced "", the dots are colloquially called "" (, akin to the English "dot dot dot").