How to Use ellipsis in a Sentence

ellipsis

noun
  • Maybe it should be styled with a question mark, or just an ellipsis.
    — Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 15 Aug. 2025
  • What inspires you to include so many ellipses in your stories?
    — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 16 Apr. 2018
  • Most endings these days opt for ellipses rather than periods.
    — Brian Davids, HollywoodReporter, 9 Jan. 2026
  • The use of ellipses in this passage fueled questions about what may have been removed and why.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 3 Oct. 2019
  • The ellipsis is doing real work there.
    — Geoff Bennett, The Atlantic, 13 Apr. 2026
  • In fact, the fart is not narrated at all but presented in an ellipsis.
    — Literary Hub, 4 May 2026
  • That icon will continue to appear on the taskbar alongside the new ellipsis icon.
    — Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica, 21 July 2022
  • But there are several points in that document that contain ellipses.
    — NBC News, 29 Oct. 2019
  • Proofs are littered with suggestive ellipses.
    — Quanta Magazine, 29 Apr. 2026
  • 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 ellipsis… the ‘dot dot dot’ that inspires the greatest practice of patience in this digital era.
    — Stephanie Petit, PEOPLE.com, 1 Aug. 2019
  • Leave it to the erudite Pau Gasol to place an exclamation point between the ellipses.
    — K.c. Johnson, chicagotribune.com, 11 May 2018
  • Sometimes a line ends in an ellipsis instead of a period, because something is going on in his head.
    — Clayton Davis, Variety, 6 Feb. 2026
  • Have there ever been ellipses more fraught with tension in the history of punctuation?
    — Chelsea Peng, Marie Claire, 1 July 2015
  • 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 of pinpricks where someone with needle and thread had tried, long ago, and without success, to mend one of the parchment’s many holes.
    — Ariel Sabar, The Atlantic, 8 Aug. 2024
  • The graphs of such curves are the conic sections — circles, parabolas, ellipses and hyperbolas.
    — Quanta Magazine, 9 July 2013
  • Their paths will stretch out into long ellipses, which take the objects much farther apart before swinging them much closer together.
    — Quanta Magazine, 15 Aug. 2019
  • 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
  • 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 quote is followed by one of those mysterious, unexplained ellipses that can’t help but raise suspicions.
    — Christian Wiman, Harper's Magazine, 2 Aug. 2024
  • The quote is followed by one of those mysterious, unexplained ellipses that can’t help but raise suspicions.
    — Christian Wiman, Harper's Magazine, 2 Aug. 2024
  • The book also makes use of ellipses, alluding to forgetting or skipping periods of time.
    — Emily Krauser, PEOPLE, 18 Jan. 2026
  • In this case, the ellipsis could insinuate that the person may have other intentions.
    — Briannah Rivera, Seventeen, 24 Jan. 2023
  • 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
  • Polk posted to Instagram after the game on a black background of an ellipses and a peace sign before deleting the story.
    — Doug Kyed, Boston Herald, 20 Oct. 2024
  • On Friday, Towns posted an ellipsis on X, a subtle signpost that changes might be ahead.
    — Wayne Sterling, CNN, 28 Sep. 2024
  • 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
  • In fact, French writer-director Bertrand Bonello leaves a lot of ellipses in his story.
    — Chris Kaltenbach, baltimoresun.com, 1 Sep. 2017
  • Each ellipsis indicates the start of a different email from a different person.
    — Mike Anthony, courant.com, 9 Aug. 2020

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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