# ellipsis

Pronunciation: say "i-LIP-sis" /ɪˈlɪp.sɪs/

## Noun

1. A punctuation mark made of several periods that signals omitted, missing, or illegible words, or in mathematics shows that a pattern continues.
   - Simple: Three dots that show some words have been left out, or that a pattern keeps going.
   - _The editor replaced the deleted clause with an ellipsis to keep the citation honest._
   - _In the equation, an ellipsis stood in for all the terms between the first and the last._
2. The leaving out of a word or phrase that can still be understood from the surrounding context.
   - Simple: Leaving out a word or phrase that listeners can still understand from what was already said.
   - _Casual conversation relies heavily on ellipsis, dropping subjects and verbs that the listener fills in automatically._
   - _The sentence "She can sing, and he can too" shows ellipsis, since "sing" is understood after "too."_
3. The leaving out of scenes in a film that do not advance the plot.
   - Simple: Leaving out scenes in a movie that are not needed to move the story along.
   - _The film employs ellipsis to skip the years of training and land directly on the final match._
   - _Through ellipsis, the story leaps from the wedding to the couple's tenth anniversary._

## Noun

4. A closed oval curve of the kind otherwise known as an ellipse. *(obsolete)*
   - Simple: A flattened, oval curve, and an older name for the shape now called an ellipse.

## Origin

An unadapted borrowing from Latin "ellīpsis", which came from the Ancient Greek "élleipsis" meaning "omission". It is a doublet of "ellipse".

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/ellipsis (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).