A few weeks ago, Rebecca gave me a lesson on the proper use of the ellipsis.

The ellipsis is probably the most mis-used punctuation mark on the planet (at least judging by my old habits. 🙂

The proper English use of an ellipsis is for there to be three (read THREE) periods (or full stops) in a row – alternately you can use the UNICODE character at U+2026 (8230) (Cryptic reference, see here.) You can also (this is much easier) use the HTML entity ….

An ellipsis is treated differently than a period, so if you use an ellipsis at the end of a sentence, you still have to follow it with a period (full stop) for the end-of-sentence. This is generally called aposiopesis – a trailing off into silence.

This might look somewhat comical, since in regular writing there’s now 4 periods in a row, but oh well – that’s writing for you.

I did think I could write this entire entry without an actual example of proper ellipsis usage… must. not. give. in….

🙂