Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: line chart
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: line chart
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: gapminder (Bryan 2025) (CC BY 4.0)
Wikidata image: line chart
Urocyon (Public domain); Wikimedia Commons; item Q776115

chart

line chart

also: line graph, curve chart

Points joined by a line to show an ordered progression.

graphique en courbes

aussi : courbe, diagramme linéaire, graphique linéaire

Points reliés par une ligne pour montrer une évolution ordonnée.

Classification

Channels

Variants

Attestation and synonyms

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 1 915 papers since 1921, 46% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Medicine, Engineering; Wikidata

Seminal references

R packages

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(gapminder)

countries <- gapminder |>
  filter(country %in% c("Brazil", "France", "India"))

p <- ggplot(countries, aes(x = year, y = lifeExp, colour = country)) +
  geom_line(linewidth = 0.8) +
  geom_text(data = filter(countries, year == max(year)), aes(label = country),
            hjust = 0, nudge_x = 1.5, size = 3.5) +
  scale_x_continuous(expand = expansion(mult = c(0.05, 0.15))) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
  labs(title = "Life expectancy rose in all three countries,\nand the gap between them nearly halved",
       subtitle = "1952 to 2007, every five years",
       x = NULL, y = "Life expectancy (years)",
       caption = "Data: Gapminder, via the gapminder R package") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "y", break_not_zero = "y") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Sources (85)

1213 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 20 books

Show the 85 sources

Cite this entry

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

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

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

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