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

chart

stacked bar chart

also: component bar chart, absolute bar chart, stacked column, stacked column chart

Bars split into segments that sum to the total.

diagramme en barres empilées

aussi : barres empilées, colonne empilée

Barres découpées en segments dont la somme forme le total.

Classification

Channels

Variants

Attestation and synonyms

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 582 papers since 1979, 48% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Chemistry, Medicine

Seminal references

R packages

R code of the ggplot2 example

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

## Each species ends exactly one bar: its name goes after that bar.
ends <- penguins |>
  count(island, species) |>
  group_by(island) |>
  summarise(n = sum(n), species = last(species))

p <- ggplot(penguins, aes(y = island, fill = species)) +
  geom_bar(width = 0.7, position = position_stack(reverse = TRUE)) +
  geom_text(data = ends, aes(x = n, label = species, colour = species),
            hjust = 0, nudge_x = 3, size = 3.5) +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = lex_number, expand = expansion(mult = c(0, 0.2))) +
  labs(title = "Adelie is the only species on all three islands",
       x = "Number of penguins", y = NULL,
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "x", arrows = "x") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Sources (43)

226 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 10 books

Show the 43 sources

Cite this entry

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

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

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

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