It is often used at the end of a sentence to mean a trailing off into silence (aposiopesis).

Virgil's phrase is an example of the figure of speech called aposiopesis.

Techniques that helped one child master words like aposiopesis and heterodyned didn't gel with the other.

If I wrote that baseball is an aposiopesis, I'd never be invited to throw out the second ball."

Because an aposiopesis implies a trailing off of thought, it is never directly followed by a period, which would effectively result in four consecutive dots.

"I will try to please Aposiopesis," she vibrated.

"I seek only the blessing of Aposiopesis," he said, "for the good of the universe, your galaxy included."

It is a hotbed of Ancient sites, good ones, regarded as shrines to Aposiopesis.

The aura of the Ancients was the unknowable God, Aposiopesis.

In coping with the unsaid and unsayable, oral history is impelled towards aposiopesis.

A classical example of aposiopesis in Virgil occurs in Aeneid 2.100.

Aposiopesis had answered.

Aposiopesis indeed!

See also aposiopesis.

That's why I wrote that baseball is a metaphor, not a simile, a personification, a hyperbole, a metonymy or an aposiopesis.

This - this was Aposiopesis Revealed!

To mark the occurrence of aposiopesis with punctuation, an em dash (-) or an ellipsis (.)

In syntax, an aposiopesis arises when the "if" clause (protasis) of a condition is stated without an ensuing "then" clause, or apodosis.

This aposiopesis - leaving the remainder of the thought understood after "If the Czar only knew . . ." - is the classic way for a subject to excuse the inefficiency or barbarism of the highest authority.

They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in periphrastics and aposiopesis, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, , oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was' their intention.

Vickers also attempts to show that Shakespeare is much more adapt at employing rhetorical devices than Peele; and gives numerous examples throughout the play of the use of antimetabole, anadiplosis, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, articulus, epanorthosis, epistrophe, aposiopesis, anaphora, polyptoton, synoeciosis, polysyndeton and asteismus.