chart

hockey stick chart

Long flat curve that bends sharply upward at the end of the series.

Classification

chart
lines and areas › lines
change over time
the name evokes: object

Channels

position on common scale; main: value
tilt/angle; secondary: acceleration (final break in slope)

Attestation

English definition: Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed., 2001

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 2 papers since 2011, 0% in the last five years; mostly in Economics, Econometrics and Finance, Social Sciences

Seminal references

naming (1999) Mann et al. (1999). Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations. Geophysical Research Letters (1 875 citations)

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(tibble)

## World population (millions), every century to 1700, then every 25 years,
## as published by Our World in Data (HYDE 2023, Gapminder 2022, UN WPP 2024).
world <- tribble(
  ~year, ~pop,
  0, 232, 100, 237, 200, 241, 300, 228, 400, 242, 500, 253, 600, 272, 700, 278,
  800, 286, 900, 311, 1000, 323, 1100, 398, 1200, 445, 1300, 456, 1400, 442,
  1500, 503, 1600, 516, 1700, 595, 1750, 753, 1800, 983, 1825, 1125, 1850, 1276,
  1875, 1375, 1900, 1627, 1925, 1979, 1950, 2493, 1975, 4071, 2000, 6172, 2023, 8092
)

p <- ggplot(world, aes(x = year, y = pop / 1000)) +
  geom_line(colour = "#9b2367", linewidth = 0.8) +
  scale_x_continuous(breaks = seq(0, 2000, 500)) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.05))) +
  labs(title = "World population took 18 centuries to grow 4-fold,\nthen two to grow 8-fold",
       subtitle = "Estimated world population, year 0 to 2023",
       x = "Year", y = "Population (billions)",
       caption = "Data: HYDE, Gapminder and UN WPP, via Our World in Data (CC BY 4.0)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "y", arrows = "y")

Sources (6)

14 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 2 books

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/hockey-stick-chart.html

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

BibTeX

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

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-02. Images last changed on 2026-11-12. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.