Ellipsis
In printing and writing, an ellipsis (plural: ellipses) is a row of three dots (...) or asterisks (* * *) indicating an intentional omission.
An example is, "She went to ... school." In this sentence, "..." might represent the word "elementary", or the word "no". The use of ellipsis can either mislead or clarify, and the reader must rely on the good intentions of the writer who uses it. Omission without indication by ellipsis is always considered misleading.
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.
The Chicago Manual of Style suggests the use of ellipsis points 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).
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.
An example of this is Pat embraces Meredith, and Meredith, Pat, in which the second instance of the word embraces is implied rather than explict.
Another example is the phrase "And so to bed", which appears on several occasions in the diary of Samuel Pepys. Another example is the opening of a poem by Robert Burns:
- Is there for honest Poverty
- That hings his head, an' a' that;
The aposiopesis is a form of ellipsis.
In grammar of languages, ellipsis is some way to explain some kind of omission. e.g.
- "Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia ever created"
can be seen as a short way to say
- "Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia that is ever created"
But this can be explained without ellipsis. "Created" can be regarded as past participle, so it modifies a noun encylopedia just like adjective does.
In computer programming, the ellipsis is Unicode character 0x2026, which is displayed as "…".