Diagram: box plot — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

Explanatory diagram: box plot — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

ggplot2 example: box plot — Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020) (CC0)

chart

box plot

also: box and whisker plot, boxplot

Distribution summary using median, quartiles and extremes.

Classification

chart
boxes and densities › boxes
distribution; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary
the name evokes: nature, object

Channels

position on common scale; main: median, quartiles, whiskers; Munzner 2014
length; secondary: interquartile range (box height); Munzner 2014
area; secondary: interquartile range (the area can sometimes depend on the number of points); Munzner 2014
spatial region; main: group; Munzner 2014
color hue; secondary: group; Munzner 2014

Variants

notched box plotnotched

Attestation

English definition: Financial Times Visual Vocabulary

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 13 158 papers since 1977, 52% in the last five years; mostly in Medicine, Computer Science, Environmental Science; Wikidata

Seminal references

invention (1977) Tukey (1977). Exploratory Data Analysis. Addison-Wesley; Ciuccarelli 2026

R packages

R ggplot2::geom_boxplot(); GitHub 7 025 stars; last commit 2026-10; paper (33 455 citations)

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(palmerpenguins)

p <- ggplot(penguins, aes(x = species, y = body_mass_g, fill = species)) +
  geom_boxplot(colour = "#535353", alpha = 0.6, width = 0.5, na.rm = TRUE) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
  labs(title = "Gentoo penguins are the heaviest",
       subtitle = "The only points beyond the whiskers are two Chinstraps, one of them\nthe lightest penguin of all (2.7 kg)",
       x = NULL, y = "Body mass (g)",
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "y", arrows = "y", break_not_zero = "y") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Sources (41)

336 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 19 books

Show the 41 sources

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/box-plot.html

ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. box plot. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/box-plot.html

BibTeX

@incollection{taudiere2026-box-plot,
  author    = {Taudière, Adrien},
  title     = {box plot},
  booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {IdEst},
  url       = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/box-plot.html},
  note      = {CC0 1.0}
}

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-06. Images last changed on 2026-11-12. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.