Ellipsis in English
The Chicago Manual of Style suggests the use of an ellipsis for any omitted word, phrase, line or paragraph from within a quoted passage. There are two commonly used methods of using ellipses: one uses three dots for any omission, while the second makes a distinction between omissions within a sentence (using three dots: ...) and omissions between sentences (using a period and a space followed by three dots: . . . .). An ellipsis at the end of a sentence with no sentence following should be followed by a period (for a total of four dots). ... According to Robert Bringhurst's
Elements of Typographic Style[sup]1[/sup], the details of typesetting ellipses depend on the character and size of the font being set and the typographer's preference. Bringhurst writes that a full space between each dot is "another Victorian eccentricity. In most contexts, the Chicago ellipsis is much too wide" — he recommends using flush dots, or
thin-spaced dots (up to one-fifth of an
em), or the prefabricated ellipsis character (
Unicode U+2026,
Latin entity …). Bringhurst suggests that normally an ellipsis should be spaced fore-and-aft to separate it from the text, but when it combines with other punctuation, the leading space disappears and the other punctuation follows. He provides the following examples:
i ... jk....l..., ll, ... lm...?n...!
In legal writing in the United States, Rule 5.3 in the
Bluebook citation guide governs the use of ellipses and requires a space before the first dot and between the two subsequent dots. If an ellipsis ends the sentence, then there are three dots, each separated by a space, followed by the final punctuation.
)