An ellipsis is three dots. It is used in writing to represent a number of different things: a pause in dialogue, a trailing thought or sense of wistfulness, slowness, ‘et cetera’, something unknown, and more.
An ellipsis can be written just as three of the full stop character (the period character) – that is, … (without spacing), . . . (with spacing). However, many modern typesetting programs (or ‘word processors’ to use some 90s terminology) will actually replace a series of three dots with a special ‘ellipsis’ character as you type. This looks almost identical to three separate full stops – the difference is that the spacing between the dots in the ellipsis character is set by the font – which makes it easier to be consistent throughout a larger document.
Conventionally, an ellipsis is three dots, but conceptually, there’s no reason why you couldn’t consider four dots, five dots, or more to be an ellipsis. Depending on what you’re writing, you might want to have multiple three-dot ellipses one after another – whether such text should be considered multiple separate ellipses or one very long ellipsis has different answers depending on if you’re a philosopher or typographer.
Conventions vary on whether you should put spaces around an ellipsis – that is, between the ellipsis and the words either side of it. Not putting spaces around it tends to make the text look cramped, and can cause clashes with other punctuation marks (such as if you have an ellipsis followed by a question mark), whereas putting spaces around ellipses tends to make the text look more aesthetically balanced, and particularly looks better when the text is justified (and the spaces expand to fill the line).
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