Q: Am I nuts, or are there two-dot ellipses? Everyone’s so wrapped up in three or more dots these days that the two-dot punctuation seems to be sidelined. As I understand it, two dots are used when someone is expressing a thought (“I seem to remember..”) and someone else finishes it (“two-dot ellipses”). Yes, no?
A: There is no “two-dot ellipsis.” Two dots in sequence are used in the language of computer coding, but not in ordinary text. Ellipsis points are always used three at a time in text (…) to show where words have been omitted.
When the omission comes at the end of a sentence, the period is often used first, followed by three more points, for a total of four dots.
The only place we’ve seen two dots used to indicate an omission in published writing is the Oxford English Dictionary, where two dots are used instead of three to show that words have been deleted within a quotation. We asked Jesse Sheidlower, the OED‘s editor-at-large, about this and here’s his response:
“It’s solely a space-saving device. I forget the exact numbers, but somewhere there’s a statistic on how many miles shorter the OED is because of the use of two-dot instead of usual three-dot ellipses.”
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