Ellipsis (…)

How to read it

Unicode encodes it as U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS, also called three dot leader, and gives three full stops as its equivalent. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a mark or series of marks used to show an omission, giving “...” and “* * *” as examples; the plural is ellipses, and the word comes from the Greek elleipsis, “a falling short”. The Chicago Manual of Style’s Q&A describes two uses. One marks a lapse, “a faltering, a trailing off, or a pause”, and takes three dots wherever it falls. The other marks words omitted from a quotation; when the words before the omission make a complete sentence, Chicago keeps that sentence’s period before the ellipsis, giving four dots.

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Spaced dots or one character?

Style guides disagree. Chicago’s traditional ellipsis is three spaced periods (. . .), which CMOS Shop Talk calls still the standard in American book publishing, and its Q&A puts a space either side of the single character except before a comma or other punctuation. The US Government Publishing Office’s Style Manual uses three periods or three asterisks separated by en spaces, and a line of asterisks for one or more whole paragraphs left out. The Guardian’s style guide uses three dots with no spaces between them and a space before and after. Butterick’s Practical Typography prefers the single character, saying three typed periods sit too close together and spaced periods too far apart. In a monospaced font such as Courier, used for screenplays, the single character shrinks to the width of one letter, which CMOS Shop Talk gives as a reason screenplays use three periods.

As a pause

The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that the link between the mark and a spoken pause is why 20th-century writers began using three dots for a pause or interruption in dialogue. Cambridge University’s feature on Toner’s book notes that we avoid ellipses in formal writing but they “pepper our emails”. For interrupted dialogue, Butterick notes that an ellipsis is common in fiction and screenplays but that most writing prefers the em dash.

Look-alikes

Unicode cross-refers the horizontal ellipsis to the vertical ellipsis ⋮ (U+22EE) and a form for vertical text ︙ (U+FE19). The two dot leader ‥ (U+2025) has two dots. Three spaced asterisks (* * *) are an older form of ellipsis that the GPO Style Manual still uses.