chart
waffle chart
also: square pieGrid of squares whose count encodes a proportion.
Classification
- chart
- sectors, tilings and units › units
- part-to-whole; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary
- the name evokes: food
Channels
color luminance; secondary: category
color saturation; secondary: category (instead of luminance)
spatial region; main: share (grouped squares)
color hue; main: category
Attestation
- English definition: Data Visualisation Guide, data.europa.eu
Scientific literature
OpenAlex: 40 papers since 2017, 58% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Medicine, Decision Sciences
Seminal references
R packages
- R
waffle::geom_waffle(); GitHub 798 stars; last commit 2023-09
R code of the ggplot2 example
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(palmerpenguins)
## Percentages rounded to whole squares: 44 + 20 + 36 = 100.
shares <- penguins |>
count(species) |>
mutate(squares = round(100 * n / sum(n)))
stopifnot(sum(shares$squares) == 100)
## Ten rows of ten squares, filled from the bottom left, row by row.
squares <- tibble(species = rep(shares$species, shares$squares),
position = 0:99,
x = position %% 10 + 1,
y = position %/% 10 + 1)
labels <- squares |>
group_by(species) |>
summarise(y = mean(y)) |>
left_join(shares, by = "species")
p <- ggplot(squares, aes(x = x, y = y, fill = species)) +
geom_tile(width = 0.88, height = 0.88) +
geom_text(data = labels, aes(x = 11, y = y, colour = species,
label = paste0(species, ", ", squares, "%")),
hjust = 0, size = 3.5, fontface = "bold", inherit.aes = FALSE) +
scale_x_continuous(limits = c(0.5, 17), expand = c(0, 0)) +
coord_equal() +
labs(title = "Over a third of the penguins are Gentoo",
subtitle = "344 penguins of the Palmer Archipelago, one square per percent",
x = NULL, y = NULL,
caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "") +
theme(legend.position = "none", axis.text = element_blank())Sources (10)
54 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 5 books
- app.flourish.studio
- Better data visualizations: a guide for scholars, researchers, and wonks
- Data Visualisation Guide, data.europa.eu
- Data visualisation: a handbook for data driven design
- Data Viz Project
- datavizproject.com
- Effective data storytelling: how to drive change with data, narrative, and visuals
- Effective data visualization: the right chart for the right data
- Storytelling with data: let's practice!
- Visualize This
Cite this entry
Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/waffle-chart.html
ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. waffle chart. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/waffle-chart.html
BibTeX
@incollection{taudiere2026-waffle-chart,
author = {Taudière, Adrien},
title = {waffle chart},
booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
year = {2026},
version = {1.0.0},
publisher = {IdEst},
url = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/waffle-chart.html},
note = {CC0 1.0}
}Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-10-22. Images last changed on 2026-11-11. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.