glossary — plain english
Gantt chart
A chart that shows a project as horizontal bars on a calendar — one bar per task — so you can see what happens when, what overlaps, and what's waiting on what.
The anatomy is simple enough to describe in a sentence: each row is a task, the bar's position and width show when it happens and its duration, arrows between bars are dependencies, and diamonds are milestones. Time runs left to right. That's the whole grammar — drawn out, part by part, in our plain-English explainer.
Henry Gantt popularized the format in the 1910s, and it has outlived every planning fashion since for one reason: it answers the question a room full of people actually has — "when will this be done, and what's in the way?" — at a glance, without anyone opening a spreadsheet or reading a document.
Making one used to be the painful part: wrestling spreadsheet cells into colored bars, or learning heavyweight project software for a six-week plan. That gap is why we built ganttchart.ai — describe the project in plain English and get the chart in seconds. The full method, whichever tool you use, is in our guide: How to turn a plain-English plan into a Gantt chart.
See it on a real chart
Describe your project in plain English and ganttchart.ai turns it into a shareable Gantt chart in seconds — every term on this page included. Or read the method first: the plain-English planning guide.