Has there been a shift in proper ellipses usage over the past few years?
I’m reading this one newspaper (magazine??) article from 1993, and I notice that ellipses will have four dots, not three. There are several uses of ellipses, so this seems standard, not just a single typo. I always thought ellipses had only three dots, but perhaps this has shifted? Was four dots the standard at one point? Was three dots standard, but there was a movement for a four-dotted ellipses that this author may have been partaking in? What’s going on here?
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Is the fourth ellipsis the period?
According to Grammar Girl www.quickanddirtytips.com:
If you’re omitting something that comes after a complete sentence, meaning that your ellipsis has to follow a period, put the period at the end of the sentence just like you normally would, then type a space, and then type or insert your ellipsis. Again, you’re treating the ellipsis as if it were a word: the first word of the next sentence. This will result in four dots in a row with spaces between each dot, but this is not a four-dot ellipsis—there’s no such thing. It is a period followed by a regular three-dot ellipsis.
@SpatzieLover Nope. There’s one that’s taking a longer quote to make it shorter, another that is in the middle of the sentence and is followed by a comma, and then another one that just has the four dots of the ellipses and then no period.
@SpatzieLover I don’t think so. I mean, possibly, but I’ve actually seen it repeatedly in this author’s work, over several pieces and publications. So it seems like something is going on other than mistakes.
I feel certain that usage is changing. That’s the way language is. As to properness—that all depends on who you think the authority is.
Personally, I always feel like a visitor in grammarland. So I do not feel it is up to me to set the standard and tell my host how they must speak. Rather I feel it is my job to do the best I can to understand my host. My host is always right in terms of usage. It is my job to figure out what they are trying to do.
I think this is the way most people think. We are instinctively good guests. This is why people who insist that others use grammar the way they want them to are called grammar Nazis. It was the habit of the Nazis to go into other people’s homes and tell them how to live their lives.
The issue of three vs four ellipses seems to me to be a pointless conversation. It is hard to mistake the meaning in either case. A polite guest will take the meaning and note that fashion may be changing as you have done.
An impolite guest will insist that one way or the other is correct and that the host is wrong for using the incorrect form, thus creating strife where none is necessary.
The elllipsis has always been three dots. In fact it’s a font character. See below, that is one character, not three.
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@Aethelflaed
Elaborating on what I posted, the ellipsis is a single character in computer typography, and has been since at least the mid-1980s when I learned to type it on a Mac.
It’s character number 133
In Windows hold down ALT and type 0133
On a Mac type OPTION and semicolon.
You get an ellipis.
If you think I’m getting something wrong, be specific, please.
@jaytkay I’m familiar with the current usage of the ellipses, my question was, why would this author be using four dots purposefully instead of three? I actually don’t know that this was typed on a computer – it’s a magazine article, so however this magazine printed things at the time. And while often computers will tighten ellipses (you type three periods, and then they scrunch together to form the ellipses, these are actually spaced out like periods. So, the question is about non-standard usage and the possible reasons for that.
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