Talk:Ellipsis

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Ellipsis article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the subject of the article.

Add new text under old text. New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help. Start a new topic Assume good faith Be polite and avoid personal attacks Be welcoming to newcomers Seek dispute resolution if needed Article policies Neutral point of view No original research Verifiability

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Archives: 1Auto-archiving period: 3 months

This  level-5 vital article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Typography Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Typography, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of articles related to Typography on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.TypographyWikipedia:WikiProject TypographyTemplate:WikiProject TypographyTypography Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the importance scale.

OED apparently uses ".." without any spaces around (example). Our article doesn't mention such kind of punctuation at all, so I'm wondering whether this corresponds to any standard in principle or is just their own quirk (then why?!). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 11:32, 19 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

Couldn't this just be an error? To cover this usage in Wikipedia, we would need to source it from a style manual. Peter Brown (talk) 21:19, 20 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

A very systematic error... :–) I see it in all their articles that I've checked in the online edition. I don't have a paper copy, but a scan from a very old edition shows the same double dot, although more loosely typeset. It's also weird that their article "ellipsis" doesn't define it as a punctuation mark, only mentioning in that sense that it's an obsolete name for the dash (for comparison, "colon" does include "punctuation-mark consisting of two dots"). And "Key to symbols and other conventions" says that "… (within cited text) indicates an omitted part of a quotation" using a precomposed glyph, rendered as three dots (I'm wondering how it looked on paper). So regarding a style manual, my question was exactly that: where they've got this strange thing from and why? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 06:19, 21 December 2021 (UTC)Reply

Coincidentally, I also discovered this recently, and have added a section about the rare two-dot ellipsis. Dingolover6969 (talk) 03:59, 23 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

The part of that section that talked about the OED has now been removed, for want of a better source. Here's the text that used to be in there, in case anyone needs a lead:

::the [[Oxford English Dictionary]]<!-- ("solely a space-saving device") this claim is presented from an authority they reached out to in the interview, but it seems like highly unlikely speculation, as the two-dot ellipsis isn't even particularly horizontally compressed--> ("to show that words have been deleted within a quotation"),<ref>{{cite web |author=Pat and Stewart |title=The Grammarphobia Blog: Two dots or three? |url=https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/12/two-dots-or-three.html |website=grammarphobia.com |access-date=22 April 2026 |language=en |date=10 December 2008}} ::</ref><ref> ::For an example of usage, see, eg, [[:File:NED Entry Encyclopedia.jpg]] ::</ref> ::

Dingolover6969 (talk) 23:44, 6 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

Our history section seems to suggest that an ellipsis evolved from the printed form of the Em dash that was written with three dashes ---. Yet it does not come right out and say it. Possibly due to a lack of an RS that puts all the pieces together like that. Or are those similarities spurious? Wonder if we'll ever know for certain. Dingolover6969 (talk) 04:08, 23 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

I would take a lot of convincing. It reads to me as that typographical equivalent of a backronym. Without an RS it would be OR, SYNTH or both. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 04:50, 23 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

To figure this out I guess I would have to read Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission by Anne Toner. It's not very certain to me from the page what exactly she's claiming. I think, I get the hunch that, she's using ellipsis in the sense of "omission of words" and thus it's not a contradiction for her to say that --- was a notation for ellipsis. Also, probably the later chapters of this book would go off into some irrelevant later history, so maybe it's not that strenuous of a journey... Dingolover6969 (talk) 05:59, 23 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Oh wow this is crazy. I think the current page is perhaps barking up the wrong tree talking about the english dash. Here's all of the relevant stuff I could find:

The dash and ellipsis points . . . were originally equivalent versions of the same mark.

—page 3, in the introduction.

In five editions of Wycherley’s The Country Wife, printed between 1675 and 1725 by a range of printers, the dash alone is used.102

But the page reproduced as Figure 8 complicates this story. This is from a 1710 octavo edition of Congreve’s Love for Love and here we see that dashes have been usurped by three dots.103 This text was published by Thomas Johnson [...] Although the 1710 Love for Love has a London imprint, Johnson printed his work from The Hague.

Many of Johnson’s plays used ellipsis points instead of dashes or hyphens. [...] One may speculate that periods might have seemed suitable for smaller formats, neatly complementing the proportions of the book. But because Johnson also used dashes, as did other publishers, including Tonson, who moved their plays into smaller formats following Johnson’s example, this does not seem the most convincing reason. More likely perhaps is that Johnson’s dots reflect the continental tradition of punctuating ellipses with points rather than dashes. Whatever the case, these plays reveal that an English audience was encountering series of dots as a variant notation of ellipsis in works written in English. They were also encountering dot, dot, dot in works published abroad. An alternative practice of marking ellipsis was in circulation.

In 1540 Estienne Dolet in La Punctuation de la Langue Francoyse commented on the non-translatability of punctuation: Although all languages have different means of speaking and writing, without exception, they have only one system of punctuation.108 The standardization of common printing types throughout Europe meant that this statement is by and large accurate, but not entirely. An examination of the print history of Terence’s ‘Quid ais omnium’ in France reveals

—pg 49, in Ellipsis marks in early printed drama § Ellipsis points

(the text resumes a couple pages later after some figures)

that interruption was signalled by another mark of punctuation altogether. Points de suspension . . . rather than a dash or series of hyphens became the conventional mark of omission in French texts. These seem to become a standard feature of the dramatic text rather later than their equivalents in England, but they are certainly well established by the 1630s.109 Furetière in his dictionary of 1690 described how: ‘Quand on met plusieurs points après un mot, c’est signe que le sens est imparfait, qu’il y a quelque lacune, ou quelque chose à ajouter.’ [‘When one puts a series of points after a word, it’s a sign that the sense is imperfect, that there’s a gap, or something to add.’]110 In Anne Dacier’s 1688 edition of Terence both the French translation and the Latin text are marked with suspension points (see Figure 9).111

—pg 51, in Ellipsis marks in early printed drama § Ellipsis points

So, um, the answer to "why dots?" is "they probably just took it from continental Europeans" and the question "why did continental Europeans use dots?" is not answered in this book because it's a book about English literature. Dingolover6969 (talk) 06:43, 23 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

There's a certain style of ellipsis usage that this page could, ideally, cover. Here are a bunch of low-quality sources I don't feel like citing that at least sort of establish what I'm talking about.

https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/742797227823661056/wonderful-example-of-the-boomer-ellipsis-as-a, https://nypost.com/2024/10/04/lifestyle/gen-z-confused-why-older-generations-use-boomer-ellipses/, https://thebigsmoke.com.au/2024/07/26/wth-are-the-boomer-ellipses/, https://www.ndtv.com/feature/explained-boomer-ellipses-in-texting-and-how-gen-z-is-reacting-to-it-6069697, https://www.hindustantimes.com/trending/what-is-boomer-ellipses-gen-z-calls-out-older-generation-for-their-texting-habits-101720595111794.html

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Ellipsis+use%22 could be useful to trawl if one could get around the grammatical papers. http://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/BLS/article/download/3469/3170 this one is nice (it's about IRC, but a similar phenomenon). That's: Punctuation as Social Action: The Ellipsis as a Discourse Marker in Computer-Mediated Communication JOSHUA RACLAW University of Colorado BLS 32, No 1 2006. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/bls.v32i1.3469 (published by the Berkeley Linguistics Society and the Linguistic Society of America) Dingolover6969 (talk) 09:47, 7 May 2026 (UTC)Reply

‘Ellipsis’ originally referred to the omission of words or other material. It later also came to refer to the punctuation mark used to indicate an omission, hesitation, or trailing off. The current lead defines an ellipsis immediately as a punctuation mark, which is valid usage, but it may obscure the older and broader grammatical meaning of the term. Would it be worth revising the opening to distinguish these two senses more explicitly? This would not require changing the article title or suggesting that calling the punctuation mark an ‘ellipsis’ is incorrect, only clarifying that the mark and the underlying linguistic concept are related but distinct meanings of the same word. Desuforeverlulz (talk) 22:08, 16 July 2026 (UTC)Reply

Sure, if you can think of a way to improve the lede that sounds fine. Dingolover6969 (talk) 05:10, 28 July 2026 (UTC)Reply