chart
bar chart
also: bar graph, column chartBars whose length encodes a quantity compared across categories.
Classification
- chart
- bars › simple bars
- ranking, change over time, magnitude; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary
Channels
length; main: value (bar length from zero); Munzner 2014
spatial region; secondary: category; Munzner 2014
color hue; secondary: category; Munzner 2014
Variants
bullet graphtarget and ranges
Cleveland dot plotdot without bar
diverging bar chartdiverging
funnel chartcentered stages
grouped bar chartgrouped
lollipop chartstem and dot
polar area chartpolar coordinates- population pyramidback-to-back
radial bar chartradial
range bar chartfloating bars
stacked bar chartstacked
waterfall chartfloating bars
Attestation and synonyms
- English definition: Brinton, Graphic Presentation, 1939↗
Scientific literature
OpenAlex: 15 420 papers since 1900, 43% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Medicine, Social Sciences; Wikidata
Seminal references
R packages
- R
ggplot2::geom_bar(); GitHub 7 025 stars; last commit 2026-10; paper (33 455 citations)
R code of the ggplot2 example
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(palmerpenguins)
counts <- penguins |>
count(species)
p <- ggplot(counts, aes(x = n, y = reorder(species, n), fill = species)) +
geom_col(width = 0.7) +
scale_x_continuous(labels = lex_number, expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.05))) +
labs(title = "Adelie is the most sampled species",
subtitle = "Penguins of the Palmer Archipelago, Antarctica",
x = "Number of penguins", y = NULL,
caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
theme_lex_viz(grid = "x", arrows = "x") +
theme(legend.position = "none")Sources (87)
1985 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 23 books
Show the 87 sources
- 100 diagrams that changed the world: from the earliest cave paintings to the innovation...
- analysisfunction.civilservice.gov.uk
- app.flourish.studio
- Applied Multivariate Statistics in R
- Atlas of knowledge: anyone can map
- Ault, Nam Liao & Musolino, Principles of Data Science, OpenStax, 2025
- Better data visualizations: a guide for scholars, researchers, and wonks
- blog.datawrapper.de↗
- Bremer & Barone, Chart, CRC Press, 2025
- Brinton, Graphic Presentation, 1939↗
- Building Science Graphics: An Illustrated Guide to Communicating Science through Diagra...
- Cartographies of Time
- Cartography: thematic map design
- Computational statistics in data science
- Data Feminism
- Data fluency: empowering your organization with effective data communication
- Data points: visualization that means something
- Data sketches
- Data story: explain data and inspire action through story
- Data Visualisation Guide, data.europa.eu
- Data visualisation: a handbook for data driven design
- Data visualization handbook
- Data visualization: a practical introduction
- Data Viz Project
- Data-driven storytelling
- data-to-viz.com
- dataphys.org
- datavis.ca↗
- datavizproject.com
- datawrapper.de↗
- Design for information: an introduction to the histories, theories, and best practices ...
- Effective data storytelling: how to drive change with data, narrative, and visuals
- Effective data visualization: the right chart for the right data
- Elavsky, Chartability: POUR-CAF accessibility heuristics
- Envisioning information
- Exploratory Data Analysis: Descriptive Analysis, Visualization, and Dashboard Design (w...
- Friendly & Wainer, A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication, Harvard University Press, 2021
- From data to viz
- Graphic presentation
- Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Gr...
- Graphics for learning: proven guidelines for planning, designing, and evaluating visual...
- How charts lie: getting smarter about visual information
- How maps work: representation, visualization, and design
- How to lie with statistics
- Info we trust: how to inspire the world with data
- Information graphics
- Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference
- Interactive data visualization: foundations, techniques, and applications
- LibreTexts Statistics, textbook chapters on charts
- Living in data: a citizen's guide to a better information
- Making and Breaking the Grid, Third Edition
- Making numbers count: the art and science of communicating numbers
- Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visua...
- More Practical Charts
- Open Visualization Academy, courses and newsletter (Cairo et al.)
- Practical charts: the essential guide to creating clear, compelling charts for reports ...
- Progressive Data Analysis: Roadmap and Research Agenda
- Questions in Dataviz: A Design-Driven Process for Data Visualisation
- royal-statistical-society.github.io
- Show me the numbers: designing tables and graphs to enlighten
- StatsLearn, “Graphs and displays” glossary↗
- Storytelling with data: let's practice!
- The art of insight: how great visualization designers think
- The big book of dashboards: visualizing your data using real-world business scenarios
- The book of circles: visualizing spheres of knowledge
- The elements of graphing data
- The elements of typographic style
- The functional art: an introduction to information graphics and visualization
- The golden age of data visualization: how did we get here?
- The grammar of graphics
- The Minard System: The Complete Statistical Graphics of Charles-Joseph Minard
- The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication
- The visual display of quantitative information
- The Wall Street journal guide to information graphics: the dos and don'ts of presenting...
- Visual complexity: mapping patterns of information
- Visual strategies for biological data
- Visualization Analysis and Design
- Visualization of Time-Oriented Data
- Visualize This
- Visualizing Uncertainty About the Future
- Visualizing with text
- Wainer & Friendly, On the Origins of Data Visualization, 2022
- Wickham, Çetinkaya-Rundel & Grolemund, R for Data Science, 2nd ed., 2023
- Wickham, Navarro & Pedersen, ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis, 3rd ed. online↗
- Wikipedia — Data and information visualization
- Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization, O'Reilly, 2019
- xeno.graphics↗
Cite this entry
Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/bar-chart.html
ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. bar chart. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/bar-chart.html
BibTeX
@incollection{taudiere2026-bar-chart,
author = {Taudière, Adrien},
title = {bar chart},
booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
year = {2026},
version = {1.0.0},
publisher = {IdEst},
url = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/bar-chart.html},
note = {CC0 1.0}
}Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-10. Images last changed on 2026-11-02. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.