bar family

`bar-horizontal`

Horizontal bars with categorical y-axis and value x-axis.

Same encoding as bar-vertical, rotated 90°. Long category names sit comfortably on the y-axis instead of being truncated or rotated. Often used for survey results, country lists, or any deeply-named ordinal categories.

When to use

Categories have long labels (countries, full company names, survey statements), or there are 8+ items where ranking is the point.

When NOT to use

X-axis is time (rotate to vertical), or bars are cumulative (waterfall-horizontal).

Rhetorical roles

compare
rank

Variants & related

Required primitives

has_axis_titles
has_data_labels OR has_gridlines

Optional primitives

has_title
has_source_note

Common anti-patterns

truncated-axis
rainbow-palette
unsourced-data

Disambiguation rules

All bars start at the same x-value (usually 0).
If bars start at progressive offsets, that is waterfall-horizontal, not bar-horizontal.
If each bar shows a min-to-max range, that is bar-range, not bar-horizontal.