What it is
An entry is a concept, not a word: "heatmap" and "carte de chaleur" are one entry, with a recommended term in each language, its variants, its synonyms and where they come from, a one-sentence definition, and for chart types a drawing, examples, channels, variants, historical landmarks and the R packages that produce it.
The vocabulary is mined from the indexes of some sixty visualization books and papers, cross-checked with online sources, then curated by hand. The counts on each page (sources, indexing books, occurrences, papers) measure how widespread a term is, never whether it is right.
The site comes in three versions: French with the English terms, English with the French terms, English only. An entry has the same address in each.
Attested, usage, judgment
- Attested: the French term is used by a French-language book or source of the corpus, named on the page. Attestation holds for the entry, including through a variant.
- Usage: a French term in common use that no source of the corpus supports. It is a debt, stated plainly; these entries are the first to verify.
- Judgment: the editor's unsourced opinion, for channels, functions and a few historical attributions. The site never presents it as a source.
How to cite
To cite an entry, cite the address of its page, which does not change: it derives from the entry's identifier. The foot of the page says when its text, images and figures last changed.
To cite the whole vocabulary:
Taudière Adrien. 2026. Visualization Vocabulary. IdEst. Version 1.0.0. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/
In BibTeX:
@misc{taudiere2026lexique,
author = {Taudière, Adrien},
title = {Visualization Vocabulary},
year = {2026},
version = {1.0.0},
publisher = {IdEst},
url = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/},
note = {CC0 1.0}
}
Report an error, propose a term
Reports and proposals go to the author, through his site: adrientaudiere.com.
Who
Adrien Taudière, IdEst, writes the dictionary and draws its diagrams. Sources, historical references and R packages are checked before they are shown; computed proposals appear only once validated.
License
The content and the R code of the examples are dedicated to the public domain (CC0 1.0), except passages quoted in quotation marks, which remain their author's, Wikimedia Commons images and example figures from other publications, which keep the license shown beneath each, the data of the examples, the typefaces and the IdEst logo. Details are in the colophon of the bibliography.
Audience measurement
Visits are counted by GoatCounter, without cookies or personal identifiers: page views, browser and country, nothing that identifies a person.
Version 1.0.0, 2026-11-12.