How to print Y axis label horizontally in a matplotlib / pylab chart?

Question

I\'m creating very simple charts with matplotlib / pylab Python module. The letter \"y\" that labels the Y axis is on its side. You would expect this if the label was longer

Answer 1

Expanding on the accepted answer, when we work with a particular axes object ax:

ax.set_ylabel('abc', rotation=0, fontsize=20, labelpad=20)

Note that often the labelpad will need to be adjusted manually too — otherwise the "abc" will intrude onto the plot.

From brief experiments I'm guessing that labelpad is the offset between the bounding box of the tick labels and the y-label's centre. (So, not quite the padding the name implies — it would have been more intuitive if this was the gap to the label's bounding box instead.)