Oh my word Ellipse, Elliptical, Ellipsis & Eclipse

“This (The Soul of the World by Roger Scruton) is rich and highly sensitive book, which engages the reader on many levels, and which approaches religion not doctrinally, but via the full range of human sensibility. … Finely written and argued, the book is philosophically sophisticated yet accessible.” —John Cottingham, Heythrop College, London and University of Reading

Ellipse is a regular oval (shape). Elliptical and elliptical are adjectives meaning shaped like an ellipse, or in the form of an ellipse (oval shaped). In geometry, an ellipse is a closed curve. Ellipse indicates to the locus of a point.

Other than the shape, elliptical also refers to something that is oblique, concentrated, obscure (not clear), compact, indirect, ambiguous, concise, condensed, terse, cryptic, laconic, abstruse, and recondite

As a verb, in grammar ellipse pertains to removing a word from a phrase, as result of removing that word from the phrase doesn’t affect the meaning or what that is conveyed. The variants of the verb ellipse are ellipses, ellipsed, ellipsing.

There was a choice for the three children: The parents asked what they would like to do for the evening. Aaron said: I want to watch a movie. Archie said: I too. BeeRam said: Me too. In the preceding sentences the ellipsed words are ‘want to watch a movie’.

Ellipsis also means oval in shape, shaped like an ellipse but it refers to a punctuation mark.

Ellipsis in typography is a series of three dots, or full stops appearing at the beginning of a sentence, or at the end or in the middle; so is the case with a paragraph. The three dots are equally spaced before and after them (she said she is utterly . . . person) but probably due to constraints of time, or with the changing times the three dots are not spaced (she said she is utterly...person).

Ellipsis appears in many languages: three dots in a row (…), or three spaced dots (. . . ). It is also called as an omission marks, three-dot ellipsis, ellipsis dots, ellipsis points, ellipsis periods, ellipsis marks. The plural form of ellipsis or ellipse is ellipses. Ellipsis denotes (informs) the reader that there is an intentional omission of some words from the beginning of the sentence, in the middle of the sentence, or at the end of a sentence or paragraph.

The three dots informs the reader that something has been left out of a quotation – the writer indicates to the reader with the ellipsis that s/he has omitted something in the quotation (words, or some words or leaving it to the reader to imagine).

Kovuuri G Reddy