text-overflow

Last updated on: May 17, 2013

The text-overflow property in CSS deals with situations where text is clipped when it overflows the element's box. It can be clipped (i.e. cut off, hidden), display an ellipsis ('…', Unicode Range Value U+2026) or display an author-defined string (no current browser support for author-defined strings).

.ellipsis {
  text-overflow: ellipsis;
}

Note that text-overflow only occurs when the container's overflow property has the value hidden, scroll or auto and white-space: nowrap;.

Text overflow can only happen on block or inline-block level elements, because the element needs to have a width in order to be overflow-ed. The overflow happens in the direction as determined by the direction property or related attributes.

The text-overflow property is shorthand for the combination of text-overflow-mode and text-overflow-ellipsis. In the almanac, for now, we'll keep them together in this article because text-overflow-ellipsis may not stick around.

The following demo displays the behavior of the text-overflow property including all the possible values. Browser support varies!

Check out this Pen!

Setting overflow to scroll or auto will display scrollbars to reveal the additional text, while hidden will not. The hidden text can be selected by selecting the ellipses.

Old Stuff

An old version of the spec says you could use an URL to an image for the ellipsis, but it looks as if that was dropped.

There is a two-value syntax, e.g. text-overflow: ellipsis ellipsis;, that would control the overflow on the left and right sides of the same container. I'm not sure how that would be possible to achieve. Perhaps centered text in a too-small container? The new spec says this, as well as defining a string, is "at risk."

I'm not sure where ellipsis-word came from. It's not in the spec or in any other documentation other than on WebPlatform.org.

Related Properties

• white-space
• overflow
• word-break
• width

Other Resources

• W3C Candidate Recommendation Spec
• MDN Docs
• Web Platform Docs
• Caniuse.com
• CSS-Tricks Line Clampin'
• Manage Multi-Line Ellipsis in Pure CSS
• Truncate String with Ellipsis

Browser Support