The surprise here is that the most influential style guide in American publishing does not want you to use it. Chicago's ellipsis is three spaced periods — dot, space, dot, space, dot — pinned together with non-breaking spaces so the line cannot split them apart. The single character is tolerated in a manuscript and then swapped out by the editor. Spaced periods remain the standard in American book publishing, which is not what most people assume as they reach for the tidy one-glyph version.
Chicago's own editors admit the appeal, mind you. This character cannot break across a line, needs no fussing with spaces, and is unambiguous to a machine: always exactly three dots, never four by accident, never a stray period from the end of a sentence. The case for the spaced version rests on tradition and typographic control, not on it being easier.
Underneath, this is formally a compatibility equivalent of three full stops, which has a real consequence. NFKC normalisation expands it straight back into periods, so the two forms are identical to some systems and distinct to others. Search for three dots and you will not find this character; search for this character and you will miss every writer who typed the dots by hand. It has a second identity, too — it is a three-dot leader, the same device that runs across a table of contents to meet the page number.
About Horizontal Ellipsis
Horizontal Ellipsis is the Unicode character … at codepoint U+2026 in the General Punctuation block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Horizontal Ellipsis
To use the Horizontal Ellipsis symbol (…) in HTML, insert the
entity … directly into your markup. The decimal entity … works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2026';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2026' evaluates to …. In Python source, write '\u2026'.
The character encodes to E2 80 A6 as UTF-8 bytes and 2026 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8230.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.