Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: histogram
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: histogram
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020) (CC0)
Wikidata image: histogram
assumed author: Romary (CC BY 2.5); Wikimedia Commons; item Q185020

chart

histogram

also: frequency chart

Distribution of a continuous variable split into bins.

histogramme

Distribution d'une variable continue découpée en classes.

Faux-ami courant : en français « histogramme » désigne souvent à tort un diagramme en barres.

Classification

Channels

Variants

Attestation and synonyms

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

R packages

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 (97)

888 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 26 books

Show the 97 sources

Cite this entry

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

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