Diagram: histogram — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

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

chart

histogram

also: frequency chart

Distribution of a continuous variable split into bins.

Classification

chart
bars › simple bars
distribution; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary

Channels

position on common scale; main: count per bin; bin on the x-axis; Munzner 2014
length; main: count; Munzner 2014

Variants

density plotsmoothed
frequency polygonpolyline

Attestation and synonyms

English definition: Brinton, Graphic Presentation, 1939 ↗

frequency chart; Brinton, Graphic Presentation, 1939 ↗

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 148 159 papers since 1899, 25% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Medicine, Physics and Astronomy; Wikidata

Seminal references

naming (1895) Pearson (1895). X. Contributions to the mathematical theory of evolution.—II. Skew variation in homogeneous material. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. (A.) (1 294 citations); Ciuccarelli 2026

R packages

R ggplot2::geom_histogram(); 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 = flipper_length_mm)) +
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 2, fill = "#7d7d7d", colour = "white", na.rm = TRUE) +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.05))) +
  labs(title = "Flipper length has two peaks",
       subtitle = "Adelie (median 190 mm) and Chinstrap (196 mm) make the first peak, Gentoo (216 mm) the second; 2 mm bins",
       x = "Flipper length (mm)", y = "Number of penguins",
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "y", break_not_zero = "x")

Sources (77)

888 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 26 books

Show the 77 sources

Cite this entry

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

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

BibTeX

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