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Statistics vocabulary · Reporting Results

Box plot

Meaning in statistics, with examples

nounCommon term

In statistics, box plot means: A chart that shows the median, the quartiles and the spread of the data as a box with lines (whiskers) extending from it, with outliers marked as separate points.

In Turkish: kutu grafiği, kutu-bıyık grafiği

How it is used

Also written 'boxplot' and called a box-and-whisker plot. Very useful for comparing distributions across groups side by side. In the common Tukey version, the whiskers reach the most extreme values within 1.5 × IQR of the box.

Example sentences

  1. The box plot shows that salaries in the sales team are much more spread out.

  2. Put the three box plots side by side so we can compare the regions.

Common collocations

  • side-by-side box plots
  • box-and-whisker plot
  • whiskers
  • draw a box plot
  • quartileOne of the three values that divide ordered data into four equal parts: the first quartile (Q1), the median (Q2) and the third quartile (Q3).
  • interquartile rangeThe distance between the first and third quartiles (Q3 − Q1), showing how spread out the middle 50% of the data is.
  • medianThe middle value when the data are put in order from smallest to largest; with an even number of values, it is the mean of the two middle ones.
  • outlierAn observation that lies unusually far from most of the other values in a data set; it may come from an error or from a genuinely unusual case.
  • histogramA chart of touching bars showing how many observations of a numeric variable fall into each interval, called a bin.

More terms: Reporting Results

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