chart

hockey stick chart

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

courbe en crosse de hockey

Courbe longtemps plate qui s'infléchit brusquement vers le haut en fin de série.

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

French term: Scotto d'Apollonia, Les controverses climatiques : une analyse socioépistémique, PhD thesis, Université Montpellier III, 2014 ↗
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 (7)

14 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 2 books

Cite this entry

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

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