chart

grouped bar chart

also: multi-set bar chart, clustered bar chart, paired column, paired bar

Bars juxtaposed within groups to compare several series.

Classification

chart
bars › grouped or stacked bars
magnitude; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary

Channels

position on common scale; main: value; Munzner 2014
length; main: value; Munzner 2014
spatial region; main: group, then series within the group; Munzner 2014
color hue; secondary: series; Munzner 2014

Attestation

English definition: Data Visualisation Guide, data.europa.eu

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 120 papers since 2008, 62% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Medicine, Social Sciences

Seminal references

first known use (1786) Playfair (1786). The Commercial and Political Atlas; Tufte 2001

R packages

R ggplot2::position_dodge(); 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 |>
  filter(!is.na(sex)) |>
  count(species, sex)

dodge <- position_dodge(width = 0.8)

p <- ggplot(counts, aes(x = species, y = n, fill = sex, group = sex)) +
  geom_col(width = 0.75, position = dodge) +
  geom_text(data = filter(counts, species == "Adelie"), aes(label = sex, colour = sex),
            position = dodge, vjust = -0.5, size = 3.5) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.12))) +
  labs(title = "Almost as many females as males\nwere sampled in each species",
       subtitle = "Penguins of known sex, Palmer Archipelago, Antarctica",
       x = NULL, y = "Number of penguins",
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "y", arrows = "y") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Sources (18)

105 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 5 books

Show the 18 sources

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/grouped-bar-chart.html

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

BibTeX

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

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