Ellipsis

Updated: 01/18/2023 by Computer Hope
Three dots in a row, forming an ellipsis.

Ellipsis may refer to any of the following:

1. Ellipsis describes three periods (...) that are together. The ellipsis is used in English to show any omitted word or text. You often see an ellipsis in file names and commands on a computer to indicate that the full file name or command is not displayed. For example, a folder could be named "Computer Hope" but displayed as "Compute..." because the file Name column is not wide enough to display the full file name.

Should I use ellipsis or ellipses?

Ellipsis is the singular form of the word. Ellipses is the plural form of the word, referring to more than one ellipsis.

2. In computer programming, two periods ".." or three periods "..." specify a range. For example, in the below Perl example, "Hello World!" would be printed 20 times.

#!/usr/bin/perl
foreach (1...20) {
 print "Hello World!\n";
}

Starting in Perl 5.12, Perl also accepts an ellipsis as a placeholder for code not yet implemented.

Keyboard terms, Period, Programming terms, Punctuation, Three dots, Word processor terms