Comments on: In Search of a 4-Dot Ellipsis

By: Rod

Rod — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:57:36 +0000

There is no such a thing as a …. four dot ellipsis

By: Maeve

Maeve — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:53:29 +0000

Thanks for all the comments. They’ve persuaded me that the original version of this post was murky and inaccurate. Since I don’t want anything like that hanging about in the Archives, I’ve revised it.

By: Carlisle

Carlisle — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:56:38 +0000

Nice post, Miriam. I agree: CMS is clear that there is no space between the end of the sentence and the period, thereby rendering “Her voice trailed off . . . . ” as “Her voice trailed off. . . . ” (no space between “off” and the first dot, which is the sentence’s full stop).

By: Miriam

Miriam — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:27:37 +0000

Chicago Manual of Style speaks of the “three and four dot method” to describe the practice of using the period plus an ellipsis at the end of a full sentence and just the ellipsis in the middle of a sentence, which may have led to the “four-dot ellipsis” confusion.

Also, while I like the spaces within the ellipsis, there should not be a space before the period itself in the four-dot manifestation, as there is in your post.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:55:52 +0000

I fundamentally disagree with the premise of putting spaces in between the dots of an ellipsis. The ellipsis is a symbol and character in its own right. So rules for punctuation within are ridiculous, no?

Yes. Especially when there’s an ellipsis character available (”…”), so there are no “.”s at all. And putting a space between the ellipsis and the period at the end of a sentence screws up the spacing (”… .” vs. “….”)

If you were using a typewriter (a real one, from the early cretaceous period, that just hammers out what you type, with no intelligence at all(!)), you’d want to space the dots, and then you obviously want a space between the ellipsis and the period as well—but people don’t live in caves nowadays, either.