ellipsis
Pluralellipses
- 1Three dots that show some words have been left out, or that a pattern keeps going.
Like leaving a gap in a sentence, where the dots quietly tell you something is missing.
She used an ellipsis to show that part of the quote was cut.
An ellipsis at the end of the sentence made it feel unfinished.
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- 2Leaving out a word or phrase that listeners can still understand from what was already said.
Like skipping the words everyone already knows, the way you call out "Coming!" instead of "I am coming."
The reply "Me too" uses ellipsis, because the rest of the sentence is left out.
Ellipsis lets us say "Going to the store?" instead of the full question.
Similaromission
Note
- 3Leaving out scenes in a movie that are not needed to move the story along.
Like turning several pages at once to skip past the parts of a story that don't matter.
The director used ellipsis to jump from childhood to adulthood in a single cut.
Thanks to ellipsis, we never see the long car ride, only the arrival.
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Less common meaning
- 4A flattened, oval curve, and an older name for the shape now called an ellipse.
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Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Latin "ellīpsis", which came from Ancient Greek "élleipsis", meaning "omission".