Ellipsis Points—Three vs. Four at the End of a Sentence What is the difference between a sentence ending with three ellipsis points and four ellipsis points? Here's the original sentence: All companies require that you take a lunch break before your eight-hour shift ends. • All companies require that you take a lunch break . . . . (What do four dots mean?) • All companies require that you take a lunch break . . . (What do three dots mean?) I know there's a technical difference here, but I can't remember what it is. Chicago doesn't address this. Thank you.
Well, the recently published Writers' Devils, by Dan Persinger does address this issue. Simply—you use 4 dots at the end of any sentence which ends with an ellipsis. Three of the dots are the ellipsis itself, and the fourth is the full stop (period) that ends the sentence. If the ellipsis comes in the middle of the sentence, you only use three dots.
A friend emailed the following info to me. It is from the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style: 13.53 Deliberately incomplete sentence Three dots are used at the end of a quoted sentence that is deliberately left grammatically incomplete. Everyone knows that the Declaration of Independence begins with the sentence “When, in the course of human events . . .” But how many people can recite more than the first few lines of the document? Have you had a chance to look at the example beginning “The spirit of our American radicalism . . .”? Note that no space intervenes between a final ellipsis point and a closing quotation mark.
