Question: Taking a personality quiz on FiveThirtyEight, there were these graphs, consisting of a regular pentagon and an irregular pentagon inside with the points further from the center being lesser and points closer to the edge being greater, on top of regularly spaced bars:

[![An example of this kind of graph with personality traits](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z4onp.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z4onp.png)

I've seen this type of graph in other places. For example, on the website for the video game ARMS:

[![The same kind of graph, but with a hexagon instead](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EywUH.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EywUH.png)

I was trying to think of a word for this, and couldn't. **What are these called?**

Answer: 
In data visualization, it is called a 

> 
> [radar or spider chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart)
> 
> 
> 

because it looks like either a radar screen with the values as you go around the circle, or it just sort looks like a spider's web. 

It is essentially a bar chart or line chart of a small set on the same scale that, instead of being arranged linearly, is arranged circularly. The spider's web is like the y-axis on a linear chart, and the colored part is the value of each item. 

Placing radar charts side by side allows a comparison of many dimensions at once based on comparison of the shapes (a much more accessible comparison than [Chernoff faces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face). It is similar to Nightingale's famous [rose chart](https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/nightingale_rose_chart.html) but the latter implies a cyclical order to the categories whereas a radar chart involves unordered categories.

[FiveThirtyEight has a good use of radar charts to compare candidates.](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-5-key-constituencies-of-the-2020-democratic-primary/) (see the graphic just above 'Group 1').
Polygon-circle graph
====================

This kind of graph is called a ‘polygon-circle graph’, according to [this Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon-circle_graph).