Ellipsis symbol …

An ellipsis does two jobs:

• Omission in a quotation: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth … a new nation.” The dots tell the reader that words were cut.
• A pause or trailing thought: “Well … I suppose we could try.” “If only she had called …”

When the omitted text comes after a complete sentence, Chicago style keeps that sentence’s period, so you see four dots: “It was over. . . . No one spoke.”

In quotations, an ellipsis must never change the meaning of what was said. Cutting “not” out of a sentence with three dots is a classic way to misquote someone.

Style guides disagree on how the dots should look:

• Chicago Manual of Style: three spaced periods (. . .), held together with nonbreaking spaces so they never split across two lines.
• AP Stylebook: three periods with no spaces between them, treated like a word with a space on each side: “He said ... nothing.”
• The ellipsis character (…): one glyph with built-in spacing. Most websites and apps use it, and it can’t break across lines.

The single character also counts as one character instead of three, which helps in text messages, page titles and anywhere with a character limit.

Don’t confuse it with ⋯ (midline horizontal ellipsis), used in math between centered operators as in 1 + 2 + ⋯ + n, or with ‥ (two-dot leader), which has only two dots.

• Word and Outlook: AutoCorrect replaces three typed periods with … by default. Undo right after it happens (Ctrl+Z) if you want plain periods.
• LaTeX: \ldots or \dots in text; \cdots for the centered version in math.
• CSS: text-overflow: ellipsis adds … automatically when a line of text is too long for its box, so you don’t have to cut strings by hand.
• Code and data: in programming languages three periods often mean something specific, such as the spread syntax in JavaScript, so never let a word processor convert them in code.