How to Use ellipsis in a Sentence

ellipsis

noun
Definition of ellipsisnext
  • Scripted to the point of obeying all the full stops and the ellipses and the hyphens.
    — Kate Aurthur, Variety, 2 Aug. 2023
  • Next, tap the ellipsis icon in the upper-right hand corner.
    — Yoni Heisler, BGR, 16 Aug. 2022
  • The very visible boldness of the editing, the leaps and ellipses, keep the idea of cutting very much at the forefront.
    — Adina Hoffman, The New York Review of Books, 18 Apr. 2019
  • The orbits of Earth and Mars are both gigantic ellipses.
    — Matt Blitz, Popular Mechanics, 20 July 2019
  • The use of ellipses in this passage fueled questions about what may have been removed and why.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 3 Oct. 2019
  • Busing of school children began in the 1970s, Burns noted (at the end of the first paragraph, where the ellipsis appears).
    — Bill Conerly, Forbes, 15 July 2022
  • Leave it to the erudite Pau Gasol to place an exclamation point between the ellipses.
    — K.c. Johnson, chicagotribune.com, 11 May 2018
  • That icon will continue to appear on the taskbar alongside the new ellipsis icon.
    — Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica, 21 July 2022
  • What inspires you to include so many ellipses in your stories?
    — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
  • To younger texters: The ellipsis can be used to convey that there’s something left unsaid.
    — Carly Mallenbaum, USA TODAY, 28 Sep. 2020
  • This only heightens the sense of an oral tradition, of errors and ellipses, of tales that have been rolled over and smoothed out over the years, like the workings of time on a stone.
    — Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books, 30 Mar. 2023
  • The porter called Snowflake has been sacrificed on the altar of such a standard-practice ellipsis.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 11 Mar. 2021
  • The ellipsis… the ‘dot dot dot’ that inspires the greatest practice of patience in this digital era.
    — Stephanie Petit, PEOPLE.com, 1 Aug. 2019
  • McGinn has popped up with the odd goal already this season and the 24-year-old loves a darting run into the box as much as Coleen Rooney loves an ellipsis (that's the last one now).
    — SI.com, 9 Oct. 2019
  • To do so, open Edge, and from the ellipsis (three-dot) menu in the upper right, select New Application Guard window.
    — Mark Hachman, PCWorld, 8 May 2018
  • Also, black is the color of the screen between the chapters of a story that takes bold narrative leaps off-screen; the impact of these ellipses is stunning.
    — Joe Morgenstern, WSJ, 20 Dec. 2018
  • Gavin Leatherwood is laughing — and speaking in ellipses.
    — Ariana Romero, refinery29.com, 24 Jan. 2020
  • The ungrammatical use of ellipses to convey a pause or . . .
    — Lynda Robinson, Washington Post, 15 May 2018
  • In fact, French writer-director Bertrand Bonello leaves a lot of ellipses in his story.
    — Chris Kaltenbach, baltimoresun.com, 1 Sep. 2017
  • Microsoft is now bringing that back into the browser, via the ellipsis (three-dot) menu in the upper right-hand corner.
    — Mark Hachman, PCWorld, 4 Mar. 2021
  • At the end of it all, he’s made another striking album that also feels like a hard reset after the ellipsis of 2020.
    — Ryan Leas, Billboard, 5 May 2023
  • There are ellipses in parts of the transcript, which a US official said doesn’t indicate missing words or phrases.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 26 Sep. 2019
  • The film begins and ends with a chorus of recordings of those calls—an appropriate ellipsis, as the search continues.
    — The New Yorker, 14 Apr. 2021
  • The graphs of such curves are the conic sections — circles, parabolas, ellipses and hyperbolas.
    — Quanta Magazine, 9 July 2013
  • His comedic rhythm feels like a throwback, with a lot of zingers and jokes that rely on audience laughter as a sort of ellipsis between punchlines.
    — Margaret Lyons, New York Times, 28 Sep. 2023
  • The Senate Leadership Fund claims that Ward’s quotes from the town hall were shortened to save time, noting that the ad used ellipses on screen to indicate that there was more said on either side of the quote that was used.
    — Meg Kelly, Washington Post, 5 Sep. 2017
  • Have there ever been ellipses more fraught with tension in the history of punctuation?
    — Chelsea Peng, Marie Claire, 1 July 2015
  • But there are several points in that document that contain ellipses.
    — NBC News, 29 Oct. 2019
  • In this case, the ellipsis could insinuate that the person may have other intentions.
    — Briannah Rivera, Seventeen, 24 Jan. 2023
  • The coupling instinct, with its flirtations and ellipses and adherence to the narrative framework of romance, felt burdensome and constraining, like an artificial limb.
    — Rachel Cusk, Harper's Magazine, 10 Sep. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ellipsis.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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