Ellipsis vs Three Periods

The ellipsis (…, U+2026) is a single Unicode character representing the three-dot suspension mark used to indicate omitted text or a trailing off in speech, while three consecutive periods (...) are three separate full-stop characters (U+002E) typed in sequence as a common workaround. Typographically, the ellipsis character has slightly tighter spacing between the dots than three manually typed periods, producing a more visually balanced result in professional typesetting. From a plain-text and search-engine perspective, the two are semantically distinct: a search engine or screen reader may handle U+2026 as a single punctuation token, whereas three periods may be parsed as sentence-ending punctuation followed by a new sentence. In programming, the three-period sequence has special syntactic meaning in many languages (spread operator in JavaScript, slice notation in Python), so using the ellipsis character U+2026 avoids accidental interpretation in source code contexts. Most word processors auto-convert three typed periods to the ellipsis character; in HTML, it can be encoded as … or ….