Ellipsis

The ellipsis is also called a suspension point, points of ellipsis, periods of ellipsis, or (colloquially) "dot-dot-dot".[5]

Depending on their context and placement in a sentence, ellipses 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 beginning or end of a sentence, the ellipsis can also inspire a feeling of melancholy or longing.

The most common forms of an ellipsis include a row of three periods or full points ... or a precomposed triple-dot glyph, the horizontal ellipsis …. Style guides often have their own rules governing the use of ellipses. For example, The Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago style) recommends that an ellipsis be formed by typing three periods, each with a space on both sides  . . . , while the Associated Press Stylebook (AP style) puts the dots together, but retains a space before and after the group, thus:  ... .[6]

Whether an ellipsis at the end of a sentence needs a fourth dot to finish the sentence is a matter of debate; Chicago advises it,[7] as does the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA style),[8] 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.[9] More commonly, a normal full stop (period) terminates the sentence, then a separate three-dot ellipsis is used to indicate one or more subsequent omitted sentences before continuing a longer quotation. Business Insider magazine suggests this style,[10] and it is also used in many academic journals. Even the Associated Press Stylebook[11] – notably hostile to punctuation that journalists may consider optional and removable to save newsprint column width – favors this approach. It is consistent in intent if not exact form with the agreement among those in favor of a fused four-dot ellipsis that the first of them is a full stop terminating the sentence and the other three are the ellipsis.

In her book on the ellipsis, Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Anne Toner suggests that the first use of the punctuation in the English language dates to a 1588 translation of Terence's Andria, by Maurice Kyffin.[5] In this case, however, the ellipsis consists not of dots but of short dashes.[12] "Subpuncting" of medieval manuscripts also denotes omitted meaning and may be related.[13]

As commonly used, this juxtaposition of characters is referred to as "dots of ellipsis" in the English language.[14]

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.[15]

An ellipsis may also imply an unstated alternative indicated by context. For example, when Sue says "I never drink wine . . . ", the implication is that she does drink something else—such 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[16] or this is used to highlight sarcasm or make the reader think about the last points in the poem.

In news reporting, often associated with 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".[17]

A drop-down menu of file operations

In computer menu functions or buttons, an ellipsis means that upon selection more options (sometimes in the form of a dialog box) will be displayed, where the user can or must make a choice.[30] If the ellipsis is absent, the function is immediately executed upon selection.

For example, the menu item "Save" indicates that the file will be overwritten without further input, whereas "Save as…" indicates that a dialog follows where the user can, for example, select another location, file name, or format.

Ellipses are also used as a separate button (particularly considering the limited screen area of mobile apps) to represent partially or completely hidden options. This usage may alternatively be described as a "More button"[31] (see also hamburger button signifying completely hidden options).

In mobile, web, and general application design, the vertical ellipsis, ⋮, is sometimes used as an interface element, where it is sometimes called a kebab icon. The element typically indicates that a navigation menu can be accessed when the element is activated, and is a smaller version of the hamburger icon (≡) which is a stylized rendering of a menu.

An ellipsis is also often used in mathematics to mean "and so forth". In a list, between commas, or following a comma, a normal ellipsis is used, as in:

${\displaystyle 1,2,3,\ldots ,100}$

or to mean an infinite list, as:

${\displaystyle 1,2,3,\ldots }$

To indicate the omission of values in a repeated operation, an ellipsis raised to the center of the line is used between two operation symbols or following the last operation symbol, as in:

${\displaystyle 1+2+3+\cdots +100}$

Sometimes, e.g. in Russian mathematical texts, normal, non-raised, ellipses are used even in repeated summations.[32]

The latter formula means the sum of all natural numbers from 1 to 100. However, it is not a formally defined mathematical symbol. Repeated summations or products may similarly be denoted using capital sigma and capital pi notation, respectively:

${\displaystyle 1+2+3+\cdots +100\ =\sum _{n=1}^{100}n=100?}$ (see termial)

${\displaystyle 1\times 2\times 3\times \cdots \times 100\ =\prod _{n=1}^{100}n=100!}$ (see factorial)

Normally dots should be used only where the pattern to be followed is clear, the exception being to show the indefinite continuation of an irrational number such as:

${\displaystyle \pi =3.14159265\ldots }$

Sometimes, it is useful to display a formula compactly, for example:

${\displaystyle 1+4+9+\cdots +n^{2}+\cdots +400}$

Another example is the set of positive zeros of the cosine function:

${\displaystyle \left\{{\frac {\pi }{2}},{\frac {3\pi }{2}},{\frac {5\pi }{2}},\ldots \right\}}$

There are many related uses of the ellipsis in set notation.

The diagonal and vertical forms of the ellipsis are particularly useful for showing missing terms in matrices, such as the size-n identity matrix:

${\displaystyle I_{n}={\begin{bmatrix}1&0&\cdots &0\\0&1&\cdots &0\\\vdots &\vdots &\ddots &\vdots \\0&0&\cdots &1\end{bmatrix}}}$

The ellipsis is a non-verbal cue that is often used in computer-mediated interactions, in particular in synchronous genres, such as chat. The reason behind its popularity is the fact that it allows people to indicate in writing several functions:

• The sign of ellipsis can function as a floor holding device, and signal that more is to come, for instance when people break up longer turns in chat.[35]
• Dot-dot-dot can be used systematically to enact linguistic politeness, for instance indicating topic change or hesitation.[36]
• Suspension dots can be turn construction units to signal silence, for example when indicating disagreement, disapproval or confusion.[37]

Although an ellipsis is technically complete with three periods (...), its rise in popularity as a "trailing-off" or "silence" indicator, particularly in mid-20th-century comic strip and comic book prose writing, has led to expanded uses online. Today, extended ellipsis anywhere from two to dozens of periods have become common constructions in Internet chat rooms and text messages.[38] The extent of repetition in itself might serve as an additional contextualization or paralinguistic cue, to "extend the lexical meaning of the words, add character to the sentences, and allow fine-tuning and personalisation of the message".[39]

In computing, several ellipsis characters have been codified, depending on the system used.

In the Unicode standard, there are the following characters:

Unicode recognizes a series of three period characters (U+002E) as compatibility equivalent (though not canonical) to the horizontal ellipsis character.[40]

In HTML, the horizontal ellipsis character may be represented by the entity reference … (since HTML 4.0), and the vertical ellipsis character by the entity reference ⋮ (since HTML 5.0).[41] Alternatively, in HTML, XML, and SGML, a numeric character reference such as … or … can be used.

In the TeX typesetting system, the following types of ellipsis are available:

Name	Glyph	TeX markup
Lower ellipsis	${\displaystyle \ldots }$	\ldots
Centred ellipsis	${\displaystyle \cdots }$	\cdots
Diagonal ellipsis	${\displaystyle \ddots }$	\ddots
Vertical ellipsis	${\displaystyle \vdots }$	\vdots

In LaTeX, note that 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.[42]

Markup	Usage	Example	Output
\dotsc	dots with commas	1, 2, \dotsc , 9	${\displaystyle 1,2,\dotsc ,9}$
\dotsb	dots with binary operators/relations	1 + 2 + \dotsb + 9	${\displaystyle 1+2+\dotsb +9}$
\dotsm	dots with multiplication	A_1 A_2 \dotsm A_9	${\displaystyle A_{1}A_{2}\dotsm A_{9}}$
\dotsi	dots with integrals	\int_{A_1}\int_{A_2}\dotsi\int_{A_9}	${\displaystyle \int _{A_{1}}\int _{A_{2}}\dotsi \int _{A_{9}}}$
\dotso	other dots	123 \dotso 9	${\displaystyle 123\dotso 9}$

The horizontal ellipsis character also appears in the following older character maps:

• in Windows-1250—Windows-1258 and in IBM/MS-DOS Code page 874, at code 85 (hexadecimal)
• in Mac-Roman, Mac-CentEuro and several other Macintosh encodings, at code C9 (hexadecimal)
• in Ventura International encoding at code C1 (hexadecimal)

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 Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), the ellipsis is used as an extension marker to indicate the possibility of type extensions in future revisions of a protocol specification. In a type constraint expression like A ::= INTEGER (0..127, ..., 256..511) an ellipsis is used to separate the extension root from extension additions. The definition of type A in version 1 system of the form A ::= INTEGER (0..127, ...) and the definition of type A in version 2 system of the form A ::= INTEGER (0..127, ..., 256..511) constitute an extension series of the same type A in different versions of the same specification. The ellipsis can also be used in compound type definitions to separate the set of fields belonging to the extension root from the set of fields constituting extension additions. Here is an example: B ::= SEQUENCE { a INTEGER, b INTEGER, ..., c INTEGER }

• Aposiopesis
• Caesura
• Cohesion (linguistics)
• Dinkus - a row of three dots (usually widely separated) alone in the middle of a gap between two paragraphs, to indicate a sub-chapter.
• An Em dash — is sometimes used instead of an ellipsis, especially in written dialogue.
• Elision – Omission or deletion of a sound or syllable
• Leader (typography) – A row of characters (usually dots or dashes) to connect items across a page (as in a table of contents)
• Leiden Conventions
• Line break (poetry)