From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
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Definition:

(1) One of three equally spaced points ( . . . ) used in writing or printing to indicate the omission of words. (Plural, ellipses.)
(2) Omission of one or more words, which must be supplied by the listener or reader.

Etymology:

From the Greek, "to fall short."

Examples:

• "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."
  (Plato)



• "Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater."
  (William Hazlitt)



• "Ellipsis can be an artful and arresting means of securing economy of expression. We must see to it, however, that the understood words are grammatically compatible. If we wrote, 'The ringleader was hanged, and his accomplices imprisoned,' we would be guilty of a solecism, because the understood was is not grammatically compatible with the plural subject (accomplices) of the second clause."
  (Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Oxford University Press, 1999)



• "If youth knew, if age could."
  (Henri Estienne)



• "Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends."
  (Virginia Woolf)



• "There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them."
  (Virginia Woolf)



• "True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love."
  (Raymond Queneau)



• "Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn't know who or what he was . . . with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands."
  (Toni Morrison, Sula)

Pronunciation: ee-LIP-sis