Ellipsis how many periods

Chicago style puts a space between ellipsis dots. A period before an ellipsis closes up to the preceding word as usual, but a space comes between the period and the ellipsis. To find more advice on the use and styling of ellipses, please see the CMOS index under ellipses. The windows of the room had before been darkened, and I felt a kind of panic on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters had been thrown back, and with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred.

A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife. I rushed towards the window, and drawing a pistol from my bosom, fired; but he eluded me, leaped from his station, and running with the swiftness of lightning, plunged into the lake.

Whether you put spaces between the dots or not is a matter of style. The Chicago Manual of Style calls for spaces between every ellipsis point.

The AP Stylebook says to treat the ellipsis as a three-letter word, with spaces on either side of the ellipsis but no spaces between the dots. You can use either style; just be consistent throughout your document. Real-time suggestions, wherever you write. Ellipsis Grammarly. Andrew, can you, um. Grammar What Are Modal Verbs? Note that Oxford began by recommending em spaces between the dots, whether four or three.

On some virtual keyboards, you can get to the character by holding down the period. In a monospaced font like Courier New, the ellipsis character is forced to take up the same width as a single period or any other single character , making it look unnaturally small. So in something like a screenplay where Courier is the traditional choice , three periods work better as an ellipsis. Distributed by King Features Syndicate Inc. Used with permission. He also contributed to the revisions of the last two editions of Kate L.

Fans of the Chicago-style ellipsis, we have a design just for you. Please see our commenting policy. I also found the ellipsis character elegant in Microsoft Word. With what edition of Word did that end?

The spacing in an ellipsis character depends on font or typeface. But you can always switch back to TNR. Not a fan of the three spaced periods, for all the reasons noted here. Nor of the ellipsis character with no spaces at all.

But in older versions of Microsoft Word, the ellipsis character used to be three dots spaced at about half the width of the font.