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Encyclopedic overview
Line chart showing the population of the town of Pushkin, Saint Petersburg from 1800 to 2010, measured at various intervals
A line chart or line graph, also known as curve chart, is a type of chart that displays information as a series of data points called 'markers' connected by straight line segments. It is a basic type of chart common in many fields. It is similar to a scatter plot except that the measurement points are ordered (typically by their x-axis value) and joined with straight line segments. A line chart is often used to visualize a trend in data over intervals of time – a time series – thus the line is often drawn chronologically. In these cases they are known as run charts.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “line chart” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.