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I want to make a diagram like this to display the career spans of several soccer players one below the next:

Career span diagram

I know it's basically a bar chart, but I was hoping this has a more specific name, because I want to search the web to find out whether d3.js can easily render one that is suitable for this specific kind of usage.

Firebug
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Sridhar Sarnobat
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    Terms like "real name" presuppose more about terminology than is justified. No committee or supervising genius lays down the law ineluctably on correct names. But "time line" is a common name. https://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781568987637 shows that its pedigree is centuries long. – Nick Cox Sep 14 '16 at 18:08
  • Fair enough, and thanks for the answer. I didn't want to crowd the title by saying "most widely accepted and precise name" to make it less readable. – Sridhar Sarnobat Sep 14 '16 at 18:10
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    In many respects this is like a [Gantt chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart), though that is usually used in a project management setting – Silverfish Sep 14 '16 at 18:15
  • @NickCox, you should probably make that an 'official' answer. I don't know if something else will come up, & otherwise this will go officially unanswered. – gung - Reinstate Monica Sep 14 '16 at 18:16
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    I have removed from the question the fact that this was [originally posted on Mathematics SE](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1926017/time-period-diagram-bar-chart-what-is-its-real-name) but closed there as off-topic - I appreciate your honesty over that fact, but I don't think it makes sense to make that the first sentence of the question - as that's the bit that shows up in search previews, it helps if the first sentence quickly gets to the point of the question! – Silverfish Sep 14 '16 at 18:19
  • @gung Thanks for the suggestion. I will see if I can add to my minimal answer in due course. – Nick Cox Sep 14 '16 at 18:28

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Terms like "real name" presuppose more about terminology than is justified. No committee or supervising genius lays down the law ineluctably on correct names.

But "time line" is a common name. The splendid scholarly survey by Rosenberg and Grafton (see reference here) shows that its pedigree is centuries long (and, for what it's worth, antedates William Playfair on the bar chart strict sense).

Nick Cox
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