Decision-critical text such as prices and warnings must not be truncated

What it is

Some strings are the decision. A price that paints as $1…, a warning that paints as This cannot be un…, and the user is confirming a proposition that is no longer on screen. Do not truncate decision-critical text means prices, irreversible warnings, error reasons, and the verb on a primary button do not go through ellipsis. They wrap, they grow the container, or they evict neighbouring decoration. Not “cut, then offer a way back.” Do not cut.

Why it happens

Confirming, comparing, or continuing uses a handful of attributes as sufficient statistics: how much, how many left, whether this step reverses, when it expires. If any of those is incomplete, judgment collapses into guessing — guessing that the red block is a warning, guessing whether the missing glyphs were cents or thousands. Money is especially brittle: fractional digits, the currency mark, tax-included or not, one clipped place and the meaning flips. In a warning, the negation or the conditional clause often lives in the second half; “cannot be undone” and “can be undone” can share a prefix. Layout pressure is exactly when these fields get shoved down the same ellipsis pipe as ordinary labels, and that is also when the decision is most expensive.

Where it stops holding

A clipped product name beside a complete price is a different bargain and is not banned here. Taglines, secondary hints, and metadata may ellipsize. What counts as critical follows the task: in a gallery the title may be the selection criterion; at checkout it is not. A dense preview card may crop a description; the same card may not crop Sold out into Sold…. In a trailing script, a price parked at the end of the line is the first thing a tail-ellipsis eats — writing direction amplifying a default, not a new rule.

Applying it

• Mark price, warning, error, short legal lines, and primary-button verbs as no-ellipsis. If the box is short, wrap or drop decoration; do not drop the number.
• Open checkout, delete-confirm, and permission dialogs at the narrowest width and largest type. Inspect only those fields for an ellipsis or a chopped glyph.
• Keep currency mark and amount as a non-breaking unit so the symbol does not survive on line one while the digits vanish into an ellipsis.

Related

• Same group: F4.10.1 Where a string is cut decides whether the leftover is still usable · F4.10.2 Middle ellipsis keeps the distinctive start and end · F4.10.3 Truncated copy still needs a path to the full string · F4.10.5 Assistive technology must still receive the untruncated string · F4.10.6 CJK characters pack more meaning per glyph, so the same character budget loses more · F4.10.7 Multiline clamp must recast with type size, not a fixed pixel height
• Nearby: F3.07 Hierarchy aligned with content priority · F4.18 Figures, alignment, and numeric type
• Search terms: decision-critical truncation · price clipping · warning ellipsis