• Guide to Punctuation
• Introduction
• Why Learn to Punctuate?
• The Full Stop, the Question Mark and the Exclamation Mark
• The Comma
• The Colon and the Semicolon
• The Apostrophe
• The Hyphen and the Dash
• Capital Letters and Abbreviations
• Quotations
• Miscellaneous
• • Italics
  • Boldface
  • Small Capitals
  • Parentheses
  • Square Brackets
  • The Ellipsis
  • The Slash
  • Numerals, Fractions and Dates
  • Diacritics
  • The Other Marks on Your Keyboard
  • Priority Among Punctuation Marks
• Punctuating Essays and Letters
• Bibliography

The Ellipsis

The ellipsis (...), also called omission marks or the suspension, has just two uses.

First, the ellipsis is used to show that some material has been omitted from the middle of a direct quotation.

Second, the ellipsis is used to show that a sentence has been left unfinished. Unlike the dash, which is used to show that an utterance has been broken off abruptly (recall the unfortunate General Sedgwick!), the ellipsis shows that the writer or speaker has simply "tailed off" into silence, deliberately leaving something unsaid:

Colonel García leered at the prisoner: "We want those names now. If we don't get them..."

San Francisco gets a major earthquake about every sixty years. It has been ninety years since the last one...

This second usage is more typical of journalistic prose than of formal writing; excepting only when you are citing a direct quotation which seems to require it, you should generally avoid the ellipsis in formal writing.

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