In printing and writing, an ellipsis 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.
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 computer programming, the ellipsis is Unicode character 0x2026.