ELLIPSIS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Ellipsis

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noun

Ellipsis n. (pl. ellipses)

(Gram.) Omission; a figure of syntax, by which one or more words, which are obviously understood, are omitted; as, the virtues I admire, for, the virtues which I admire.

(Geom.) An ellipse. (Obs.)

(Printing) A printing symbol, usually three periods in a row (....), indicating the omission of some part of a text; used commonly in quotations, so as to suppress words not essential to the meaning. A long dash ( -) and three asterisks (* * *) are sometimes used with the same meaning.

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Etymology of 'Ellipsis'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Ellipsis" Quotes from Famous Books

... ellipsis. Fame is not a passion, though love is: but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds "love and fame," as if they of themselves immediately implied "love, and love of fame." Pope's rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to the eye instead of the ear; and this to a greater ...

— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... a unique type of ellipsis to represent where material has been left out of poetry quotations and out of the story line of a poem. They are indicated ...

— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... like a parrot, without having ever stopped to evoke an image. He preaches about service and duty without any recognition of natural demands or any standard of betterment. His moral life is one vast anacoluthon in which the final term is left out that might have given sense to the whole, one vast ellipsis in which custom seems to bridge the chasm left between ideas. He denies the values of sense because they tempt to truancies from mechanical activity; the values of reason he necessarily ignores because they lie beyond his scope. He adheres to conventional maxims and material ...

— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... ingredients are chemically identical in quality and proportion; but the nameless, inimitable, inscrutable life is wanting: the mixing has been done by a mechanical, not by a creative hand. Haydon says, "The curve of the circle is excess, the straight line is deficiency, the ellipsis is the degree between, and that curve, added to or united with proportion, regulates the form and features of a perfect woman." Mr. D.R. Hay, in a series of books, professes to have discovered the principles of beauty in the law of harmonic ...

— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... and made a fierce gesture which supplied the ellipsis to his companion: but the latter had little wish to pursue such a theme, and he diverted the conversation into another channel, resuming a topic which ...

— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey

... think one can say a plain thing in a plain way? You think that words mean nothing more than themselves, and that you can talk without ellipsis, and that customary phrases have not their connotations? You think that, do you? Listen then to the tale of Mr Benjamin Franklin Hard, a kindly merchant of Cincinnati, O., who had no particular religion, but who had accumulated ...

— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... text has been transliterated within brackets "{}" using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. Diacritical marks have been lost. Phoenician or other Semitic text has been replaced with an ellipsis in brackets, ...

— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... she was of the ellipsis, and afraid it would never be filled in if she interrupted, Sofia could not help uttering a sound of regret and pity for the lot of the mother she had never seen, whose untimely death had ended a life accounted unendurable as Victor's ...

— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... solid bodies which move in the sphere of the sun's activity, and that they describe an ellipsis so very eccentric, and so near to parabolas, that certain comets must take up above five hundred years ...

— Letters on England • Voltaire