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", but the quoter wanted to leave that part out, so they put an ellipsis there to be true to the source.
The three-dot version is also used to indicate a pause in speech, or used at the end of a sentence to indicate a trailing off into silence.
Some style guide says in quotes you need to surround brankets for ellipses to show it was modified from the original.
An ellipsis is also a figure of speech, the omission of a word or words required by strict grammatical rules but not by sense. A well known 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 for
- "Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia that is ever created"
But this can be explained without ellipsis. "created" can be regared 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 "…".