ellipses

Here the plural follows the Greek pattern, where singular -is becomes -es, as crisis becomes crises. One spelling covers the dotted mark, the rhetorical omission, and the film cut that skips scenes, and each can be counted: a writer can scatter ellipses across a page, and a director can build a film from them. The spelling it shares with curves belongs to the geometric plural.

The plural of the curve, formed the ordinary English way by adding -s to ellipse. The same spelling is also the plural of ellipsis, so ellipses can name curves or omissions, and the surrounding words decide which. The two nouns also overlap in meaning: ellipse can itself mean a grammatical omission, and ellipsis was once a name for the curve.