Visualization VocabularyDataviz vocabulary
Diagram: spine chart
Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)
ggplot2 example: spine chart
Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020) (CC0)

chart

spine chart

also: spine

Single value split into two opposed components either side of an axis.

graphique en épine

aussi : spine

Valeur unique scindée en deux composantes opposées de part et d'autre d'un axe.

Cas particulier du diagramme en barres divergentes. Le Visual Vocabulary français garde le terme anglais, faute d'équivalent établi.

Classification

Channels

Attestation

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 3 papers since 2026, 33% in the last five years; mostly in Medicine, Mathematics

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(palmerpenguins)

## Each group split on either side of the spine: females left, males right.
sexes <- penguins |>
  filter(!is.na(sex)) |>
  count(species, island, sex) |>
  mutate(group = paste(species, "on", island),
         side = ifelse(sex == "female", -n, n))

p <- ggplot(sexes, aes(x = side, y = group, fill = sex)) +
  geom_col(width = 0.7) +
  geom_vline(xintercept = 0, colour = "#535353", linewidth = 0.4) +
  annotate("text", x = c(-30, 30), y = 5.6, label = c("Females", "Males"),
           colour = c("#9b2367", "#2e7891"), size = 3.2) +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c(female = "#9b2367", male = "#2e7891")) +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = \(x) lex_number(abs(x)), limits = c(-65, 65)) +
  scale_y_discrete(limits = rev, expand = expansion(add = c(0.6, 1))) +
  labs(title = "Every group has nearly as many females as males",
       subtitle = "333 penguins of known sex, Palmer Archipelago",
       x = "Penguins", y = NULL,
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "x", arrows = "") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Sources (16)

32 occurrences in the corpus

Show the 16 sources

Cite this entry

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

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

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

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