Monoecious or dioecious evergreen trees or shrubs with a simple indumentum. Leaves alternate, bifarious, petiolate, stipulate, simple, entire, penninerved. Flowers axillary, fasciculate. Male flowers pedicellate; sepals (5-) 6, biseriate, imbricate; petals 0; disc 0; stamens 3-8, completely fused into a sessile column; anthers extrorse, connective produced, longitudinally dehiscent; pistillode 0 or minute. Female flowers pedicellate; calyx-lobes 6, imbricate; petals 0; disc 0; ovary 3-15-celled, with 2 ovules per cell; styles connate into a column, lobed or toothed at the top, rarely free, usually lengthening during or after flowering. Fruit plurilobate, often with 2 x as many lobes as cells, globose or apically or basally depressed, dehiscing into bivalved coriaceous or crustaceous cocci, with the epicarp separable or not. Seeds hemispherical or laterally compressed; exotesta often fleshy; endotesta crustaceous; albumen fleshy; cotyledons flat.

A large predominantly Tropical Asiatic and Pacific genus of about 300 species, with a few also in Madagascar and Tropical America. Only 1 species in Pakistan.

Lower Taxon

• Glochidion velutinum Wight

Related Synonym(s):

• Phyllanthus velutinus (Wight) Muell. Arg. = Glochidion velutinum Wight