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‘A very useful resource’ ... once it arrived in English print, the ellipsis became rapidly popular and remained so.
‘A very useful resource’ ... once it arrived in English print, the ellipsis became rapidly popular and remained so. Photograph: Alamy
‘A very useful resource’ ... once it arrived in English print, the ellipsis became rapidly popular and remained so. Photograph: Alamy

Unfinished story … how the ellipsis arrived in English literature

This article is more than 8 years old

A Cambridge academic claims to have found the first use of a ‘brilliant innovation’ that has endured as a mark of incomplete speech

One of the earliest examples of the ellipsis, that tantalising piece of punctuation masterfully used to whet the appetite of Adele fans on Sunday night, has been traced to the 16th century by a Cambridge academic.

Dr Anne Toner believes she has identified the earliest use of the ellipsis in English drama, pinning it down to a 1588 edition of the Roman dramatist Terence’s play,

Andria, which had been translated into English by Maurice Kyffin and printed by Thomas East, and in which hyphens, rather than dots, mark incomplete utterances by the play’s characters.

Cambridge academic Dr Anne Toner believes this 1588 edition of Roman dramatist Terence’s 
Andria is the first time the ellipsis was printed in an English play's script.
Cambridge academic Dr Anne Toner believes this 1588 edition of Roman dramatist Terence’s Andria is the first time the ellipsis appeared in print in English. Photograph: British Library

Although there are instances of ellipses occurring in letters around the same time, this is the earliest printed version found by Toner following her chronological research into the earliest dramas in print.

“This was a brilliant innovation,” she writes in Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission, a history of the use of dots, dashes and asterisks to mark a silence of some kind, which has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

“There is no play printed before Kyffin’s Andria and listed in WW Greg’s Bibliography of English Printed Drama that marks unfinished sentences in this way. This is not to say that these were the first ellipses in English print. There are appearances of the mark earlier in the 1580s. Henry Woudhuysen has identified dashes in letters printed in 1580 and 1585, where in both cases the mark occurs as part of an informal, conversational style.”

But drama was “especially important” in the evolution of the ellipsis, according to Toner, being the literary form “that is connected in the most concentrated way with speech as it is spoken”. And after its appearance in the 1588 Andria, the punctuation mark quickly caught on.

“It’s interesting to think about whose idea it was to use what turned out to be a very useful resource … was it the translator of the Terence play, or the printer? Who the agent was behind the mark is very unclear,” Toner said. “But you then start to see it being used relatively quickly in dramatic works … in Ben Jonson plays, for example.”

It also appears in Shakespeare. Toner writes of Henry IV, Part I, that “Hotspur dies on a dash”, with his last words cut short: “no, Percy, thou art dust / And food for--

By the 18th century, said Toner, it “becomes very common in print, and blanking starts to be used as a means of avoiding libel laws”, with series of dots starting to be seen in English works, as well as hyphens and dashes, to mark an ellipsis.

A page from the 1901 edition of The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story by Joseph Conrad and Ford M Hueffer, in which ellipses appear more than 400 times. Photograph: Cambridge University

Embraced by writers from Percy Shelley to Virginia Woolf, it was in the novel that the ellipsis “proliferated most spectacularly”, according to Toner. She points to Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad’s use of ellipses more than 400 times in their 1901 novel The Inheritors. Ford said that the writers were aiming to capture “the sort of indefiniteness that is characteristic of all human conversations, and particularly of all English conversations, that are almost always conducted entirely by means of allusions and unfinished sentences”.

The ellipsis makes its first appearances in the very first lines of The Inheritors:

‘IDEAS,’ she said. ‘Oh, as for ideas——’

‘Well?’ I hazarded, ‘as for ideas——?’

Not everyone approves of its use, however. Toner highlights Umberto Eco’s description of “the ghastliness of these dots” in 1994 – and today, according to Cambridge University, “we avoid using dots and dashes in formal writing”. But Adele’s Sunday night teaser, welcomed in the Guardian with the line “All hail the power of an ellipsis”, showed, according to the university, that “in our haste to communicate the moods of our thoughts, we just can’t resist them’.

Six of the best ellipses in literature

From Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne:

“Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?—Good G..! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,—Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?—Nothing.”

From The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot:

“ I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

From The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

“... I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.”

From “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson:

“’Hope’ is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -”

Letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West:

if I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you—”

Virginia Woolf imagines death by a bomb in her diary:

“Yes. Terrifying. I suppose so - Then a swoon; a drum; two or three gulps attempting consciousness - and then, dot dot dot.”


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