An ellipsis is a rhetorical figure of speech, the omission of a word or words required by strict grammatical rules but not by sense. The missing words are implied by the context. The aposiopesis is special form of rhetorical ellipsis.

Typical examples of this are:

Pat embraces Meredith, and Meredith, Pat,

in which the second instance of the word embraces is implied rather than explicit.

And so to bed,

which appears on several occasions in the diary of Samuel Pepys, meaning and so I went to bed.

Is there for honest Poverty

That hings his head, an' a' that;

from the opening of a poem by Robert Burns. Burns is asking:

Is there an honest man among us who hangs his head, and otherwise cringes, because of his Poverty?

It is also used when the same word, for example "there is" or "I am" is left out of a sentence many times.

It is also used in film, when viewers are shown the beginning of the action and its end and are left to guess what happens in between.

Ellipse (Sprache) | Elipsis | Ellissi | Ellips (stijlfiguur) | Elipsa (teoria literatury) | Elipse (figura de estilo) | Elipsa (jezikoslovje)