The term box plot is a synonym for a box-and-whisker plot

A box-and-whisker plot is a graphical display of a five-number summary.

In a box-and-whisker plot, the ‘box’ covers the interquartile range (IQR), with ‘whiskers’ reaching out from each end of the box to indicate maximum and minimum values in the data set. A vertical line in the box is used to indicate the location of the median.

The box-and-whisker plot below has been constructed from the five -number summary of the resting pulse rates of 17 students.

The term ‘box-and-whisker plot’ is commonly abbreviated to ‘box plot’.

A five-number-summary is a method for summarising a data set using five statistics, the minimum value, the lower quartile, the median, the upper quartile and the maximum value.