How to type Ellipsis
To type Ellipsis (…), press Alt + 0133 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + ; on Mac, or write … in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+2026 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 2026 on Linux, or 2026 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Horizontal Ellipsis
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+2026
- Windows
- Alt + 0133
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 0133 | Hold Alt and type the number on the numeric keypad. |
| Mac | Option + ; | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | … | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+2026 | HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS |
Other punctuation symbols
… lives in the General Punctuation block (U+2000-U+206F), dashes, quotation marks, spaces and reference marks used across languages. Within Unicode it is classified as Po, a punctuation mark.
What happens to … in a search box
… is a compatibility character: Unicode says it can be rewritten as ..., three separate characters. Anything that normalises text to NFKC before comparing it does exactly that, which is why … pasted into a search field, a URL slug or a username can come back as ... and match text that never contained … at all. NFC, the form this site uses, leaves it alone.
What Ellipsis is used for
In mathematical notation … is an ordinary symbol: it carries no special spacing and sits in an expression the way a letter does, standing for a thing rather than doing something to the things around it. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\unicodeellipsis$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
Unicode publishes a second list of names for … in CLDR, the keywords its own search data offers rather than the formal name, and they are dots and omission. Those words are what somebody looking for this character is liable to type when Ellipsis is not the name they know it by, and the search on the symbol lists matches them as well as the Unicode name.
What Unicode says about Ellipsis
The standard recognises … under another name as well: three dot leader. That is a formal alias, not a nickname, which is why it turns up in other people's documentation for the same codepoint.
The code chart points from … to vertical ellipsis (U+22EE) and presentation form for vertical horizontal ellipsis (U+FE19). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Ellipsis looks nearly right but not quite.
How Ellipsis behaves in software
… is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It carries no direction of its own, so in a line that mixes English with Arabic or Hebrew it takes the direction of the text around it rather than forcing one.
Every way to write Ellipsis
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+2026 |
| Decimal | 8230 |
| UTF-8 bytes | E2 80 A6 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 20 26 |
| HTML entity | … |
| HTML numeric | … or … |
| CSS | \2026 |
| JavaScript | \u2026 |
| Python | \u2026 |
| URL-encoded | %E2%80%A6 |
| LaTeX, in prose | \ldots |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\unicodeellipsis$ |
| SVG | 2026.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If … arrives as …
One character has become three, which is what a three-byte UTF-8 sequence looks like when each byte is read separately: E2 80 A6 read as Windows-1252 gives exactly …. The text is intact and the damage is in the reading, so setting the reader to UTF-8 restores it and retyping does not. A rectangle instead of the mojibake means the opposite: the encoding is right and the font has no glyph at U+2026, which for a character this far outside Latin-1 is common in older office fonts.