Diagram: violin plot — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

ggplot2 example: violin plot — Adrien Taudière (CC0); R code ↓; data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020) (CC0)

chart

violin plot

Distribution density mirrored on both sides of an axis.

diagramme en violon

aussi : tracé en violon

Densité de distribution symétrique de part et d'autre d'un axe.

Classification

chart
boxes and densities › density shapes
distribution; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary
the name evokes: object

Channels

position on common scale; main: value
length; main: density
spatial region; main: group

Variants

bean plotone line per observation
raincloud plothalf violin with box and points
sina plotpoints spread by density

Attestation

French term: Financial Times Visual Vocabulary, French version ↗
English definition: ggplot2 reference

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 1 818 papers since 2004, 83% in the last five years; mostly in Medicine, Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, Computer Science; Wikidata

Seminal references

invention (1998) Hintze & Nelson (1998). Violin Plots: A Box Plot-Density Trace Synergism. The American Statistician (1 855 citations)

R packages

R ggplot2::geom_violin(); GitHub 7 025 stars; last commit 2026-10; paper (33 455 citations)
R vioplot::vioplot(); GitHub 29 stars; last commit 2025-02; paper (80 citations)

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(palmerpenguins)

set.seed(20261014)
p <- ggplot(penguins, aes(x = species, y = body_mass_g, fill = species, colour = species)) +
  geom_violin(alpha = 0.3, na.rm = TRUE) +
  geom_jitter(width = 0.12, size = 0.9, alpha = 0.7, na.rm = TRUE) +
  scale_y_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
  labs(title = "Adelie and Chinstrap penguins weigh about the same",
       subtitle = "One dot per penguin",
       x = NULL, y = "Body mass (g)",
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "y", arrows = "y", break_not_zero = "y") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Sources (28)

30 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 6 books

Show the 28 sources

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en/term/violin-plot.html

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

BibTeX

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

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