What Are Frequency Tables?

Imagine that you want to figure out how many different sweaters, pants, and jackets you have. You can try to keep track of all the separate clothes in your head, but you might get confused because of having to remember so many different things, and it’ll become difficult to keep an overview. For such occasions, a frequency table can be of great use.

In a frequency table, you can write the separate things you’re going to count. In this example it’ll be sweaters, pants, and jackets. You make a table with the different clothes and make a line next to the item you’re counting—each time you count a sweater, you mark a line next to the word “sweater”. You can do the same for pants and jackets every time you count a pair of pants or a jacket.

If you have ten sweaters, eight pants, and seven jackets, your table will look something like this when you’re done counting:

We call these lines tally marks. When there are very many lines next to each other, it can be hard to count them individually. So we’ll show you a trick that makes it easier to see how many lines you’ve drawn for each item.

The trick is to put every fifth line across the four last ones. That way, each group will be made up of five lines together. The table you made earlier will then look like this:

It gets a lot easier to keep an overview of your count when you place the fifth line across the previous four lines in groups like this. You can easily see that you have ten sweaters, eight pants, and seven jackets.

It’s usually best to use tally marks when counting numbers of items. But it can also be smart to write a number in the table when you’re done counting. That’s because numbers are even easier and faster to read than the tally marks. When we add numbers, the table with sweaters, pants, and jackets will then look like this:

Now you’ve made a table that shows have many sweaters, pants, and jackets you have, both with and without numbers. This is a method of sorting information. Sometimes you will get math exercises with tables that only have numbers, and sometimes only tally marks. Either way it is best to have tables with both tally marks and numbers, since it gives you the best overview.