Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: stem-and-leaf plot
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: stem-and-leaf plot
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: Michelson 1882, via HistData (Friendly et al. 2026) (GPL)
Wikidata image: stem-and-leaf plot
Safwat.alshazly (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikimedia Commons; item Q737802

chart

stem-and-leaf plot

Distribution where each value stays readable, the leading digit forming the stem and the next the leaf.

Classification

  • chart
  • text
  • distribution
  • the name evokes: nature

Channels

Attestation

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 144 papers since 1986, 12% in the last five years; mostly in Mathematics, Computer Science, Medicine; Wikidata

Seminal references

R packages

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(HistData)

## Speed of light, measured to the nearest 10 km/s: the hundreds make the
## stem, split in two (leaves 0-4, then 5-9), the tens the leaf.
leaves <- Michelson |>
  mutate(v = 299000 + velocity, stem = v %/% 100, leaf = (v %/% 10) %% 10,
         half = stem * 2 + (leaf >= 5)) |>
  arrange(half, leaf) |>
  group_by(half) |>
  mutate(position = row_number()) |>
  ungroup()
stems <- tibble(half = seq(min(leaves$half), max(leaves$half))) |>
  mutate(label = half %/% 2)

p <- ggplot(leaves, aes(x = position, y = -half)) +
  geom_text(aes(label = leaf), size = 3, colour = "#9b2367") +
  geom_text(data = stems, aes(x = -0.6, y = -half, label = label), hjust = 1, size = 3, colour = "#535353") +
  geom_vline(xintercept = 0, colour = "#535353", linewidth = 0.4) +
  scale_x_continuous(limits = c(-3.5, 30), expand = c(0, 0)) +
  labs(title = "Over half of the measurements lie from 299 800 to 299 890",
       subtitle = "Speed of light (km/s), 100 measurements of 1879; 2998 | 7 reads 299 870",
       x = NULL, y = NULL,
       caption = "Data: Michelson 1882, via the HistData R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "") +
  theme(axis.text = element_blank())

Sources (12)

29 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 6 books

Show the 12 sources

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/stem-and-leaf-plot.html

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

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

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-02. Images last changed on 2026-11-09. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.