Typographic punctuation
HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026)
Three dots in a single character, with tighter spacing than three periods and no chance of a line break inside it.
- Codepoint
U+2026- Also written as
u2026\u2026…- Category
- Typographic punctuation
- Removed by default
- No
- Governing option
- Punctuation
--punct - Can be load-bearing
- No
Copy and paste U+2026
To copy and paste HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS (U+2026), press the button: the character itself goes to your clipboard, and Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) pastes it anywhere you can type.
Where it comes from
Autocorrect (three periods become one ellipsis), publishing style guides, and every operating system's text substitution.
Why it matters
It is one character where a reader sees three, so string length, truncation logic and comparison all disagree with the eye. Like the em dash it is a typography difference rather than something hidden.
Before and after
One codepoint becomes three, and `text.length` changes by two.
The character is shown as a labelled chip so you can see where it sits. In your text it draws nothing at all.
When it is legitimate
In typeset prose, where it is the correct way to set an ellipsis.
How to remove it
Turn on Punctuation (`--punct`) and it becomes three ASCII periods.
Working in a file rather than a paste? The document report for .docx, .odt and .html finds it inside the file, together with hidden runs and tracked changes, without you having to open it. If the question is what the rest of the writing does rather than what this one character does, count the dashes and stock transitions and see where each habit sits, with no score and no claim about who wrote the text.
Is it an AI watermark?
Appears in some AI output, but is not a watermark
Models produce it because their training text is typeset. So does your word processor, automatically, without asking. It is not a watermark and not a reliable signal of anything.
It genuinely turns up in model output, as ordinary typography learned from the training data. It is not deliberate, not detectable by design, and not evidence about any single document.
Questions
Why does my character count disagree with what I see?
An ellipsis is one codepoint that draws three dots. Truncating at a fixed length gives different results before and after normalising it.
Which form should I use?
In typeset prose, the single character. In code, filenames and plain-text protocols, three periods, because they are unambiguous.
Check your own text
Paste anything into the cleaner to see every hidden character it contains, with position, codepoint and what happens to each one. Nothing is uploaded.
Check your own textClean it in Chrome as you pasteClean it on your Mac with one keystrokeAll characters