The ellipsis ... (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term originates from the Ancient Greek: ἔλλειψις, élleipsis meaning leave out.Opinions differ as to how to render ellipses in printed material. According to The Chicago Manual of Style, it should consist of three periods, each separated from its neighbor by a non-breaking space: . . .. According to the AP Stylebook, the periods should be rendered with no space between them: .... A third option is to use the Unicode character U+2026 … HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS. Background
The ellipsis is also called a suspension point, points of ellipsis, periods of ellipsis, or (colloquially) "dot-dot-dot". Depending on their context and placement in a sentence, ellipses can indicate an unfinished thought, a leading statement, a slight pause, an echoing voice, or a nervous or awkward silence. Aposiopesis is the use of an ellipsis to trail off into silence—for example: "But I thought he was..." When placed at the end of a sentence, an ellipsis may be used to suggest melancholy or longing.The most common forms of an ellipsis include a row of three periods or full points ... or a precomposed triple-dot glyph, the horizontal ellipsis …. Style guides often have their own rules governing the use of ellipses.
The extent of repetition in itself might serve as an additional contextualization or paralinguistic cue, to "extend the lexical meaning of the words, add character to the sentences, and allow fine-tuning and personalisation of the message". Computer representations
In computing, several ellipsis characters have been codified, depending on the system used. In the Unicode standard, there are the following characters:

Unicode recognizes a series of three period characters (U+002E) as compatibility equivalent (though not canonical) to the horizontal ellipsis character.In HTML, the horizontal ellipsis character may be represented by the entity reference &hellip; (since HTML 4.0), and the vertical ellipsis character by the entity reference &vellip; (since HTML 5.0). Alternatively, in HTML, XML, and SGML, a numeric character reference such as &#x2026; or &#8230; can be used. In the TeX typesetting system, the following types of ellipsis are available:

In LaTeX, note that the reverse orientation of \ddots can be achieved with \reflectbox provided by the graphicx package: \reflectbox{\ddots} yields . With the amsmath package from AMS-LaTeX, more specific ellipses are provided for math mode. The horizontal ellipsis character also appears in the following older character maps:

in Windows-1250—Windows-1258 and in IBM/MS-DOS Code page 874, at code 85 (hexadecimal)
in Mac-Roman, Mac-CentEuro and several other Macintosh encodings, at code C9 (hexadecimal)
in Ventura International encoding at code C1 (hexadecimal)Note that ISO/IEC 8859 encoding series provides no code point for ellipsis.