---
name: Sparkline
slug: sparkline
category: component
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A tiny chart with no axes or labels, drawn inline at text size to
  show the shape of a trend beside the number it belongs to.
aliases:
  - name: mini chart
    source: community
  - name: inline chart
    source: community
  - name: trend line
    source: community
  - name: micro chart
    source: community
tags:
  - dataviz
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - chart
    - stat
    - waveform
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - meter
    - direct-labeling
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "Cloudscape Design System: components"
    url: https://cloudscape.design/components/
  - title: Sparkline (Wikipedia)
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: a trend line small enough to sit inline
---

Edward Tufte coined the word for a chart small and quiet enough to live in a
sentence, and the [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline) still
carries his framing: a small, intense, word-sized graphic. The point is not that it
is a shrunken chart. It is that it is typography. A sparkline sits in a line of prose
or in a table cell, at roughly the height of the surrounding text, and it is read the
way a word is read, at a glance and in place, without the eye having to travel to a
separate figure and come back.

The missing axes are the design, not a compromise. A sparkline answers "which way,
and how smoothly", and it answers that from shape alone: rising, falling, flat,
spiky, seasonal, cliff. Adding gridlines, tick labels, or a legend does not make it
more informative, it makes it a small bad chart, because at that size the furniture
consumes the pixels the data needed. If a reader has to know the exact value, that is
a job for a number, which is why a sparkline almost always travels with one: the
current figure in bold beside the line, and often the endpoints or the period high
and low marked with a single dot each.

There is one honest caveat, and it is worth stating out loud wherever sparklines
appear together. Each line is usually scaled to its own range, so a metric that
wobbled by three units and one that swung by three thousand can produce identical
looking peaks. Stacked in a table that reads as a comparison, they will be compared,
and the comparison will be wrong. The fixes are to scale a group of related series to
a shared range, to keep the companion number close enough that it corrects the
impression, or to label the range once for the whole column.

Interactivity is where the word starts to slip. A tiny line chart with a tooltip on
every point, a hover crosshair, and a click target per data point is a small chart,
not a sparkline, and calling it one sets the wrong expectation about density and
reading effort. "Mini chart" and "micro chart" are the honest names for that thing,
and several component libraries use them precisely so the two do not get confused.
Keep "sparkline" for the wordless one.