Digits instead of crosses
Stem and leaf plots are closely related to stacked dot plots. The crosses are replaced by digits that provide a little more detail about the values that they represent.
Stems and leaves
In a stem and leaf plot, the axis is replaced by a column of 'stems' — the most significant digits of the values in the data. The digits that replace the crosses are called 'leaves' and give a further significant digit of each value on a stem.
A final refinement is to sort the leaves into increasing order on each stem.