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Dioecious trees or shrubs.Indumentum simple and/or minutely pseudolepidote.Trunks occasionally stilt-rooted.Twigs stout, often with pronounced leaf scars, producing an exudate when cut, which hardens and darkens on drying.Leaves alternate, usually crowded towards the end of the twigs, petiolate or subsessile, stipulate or not; blades simple, often obovate, entire, penninerved.Inflorescences axillary, or borne on older wood, solitary or fasciculate, pedunculate, with a whorl of 5–12 involucrate imbricate tepaloid bracts surrounding the flowers; male inflorescences many-flowered, the flowers in dense globose capitula; female inflorescences 1-flowered.Male flowers sessile; calyx campanulate or turbinate, truncate, dentate or irregularly or regularly lobed, the lobes imbricate; petals absent; disk absent; stamens (4)5(6), free, episepalous, anthers erect, subbasifixed, introrse, thecae parallel, longitudinally dehiscent; pistillode cylindric-obconic, infundibuliform, hypocrateriform, pileiform or sometimes lobed.Female flowers sessile; calyx minute, truncate, sinuate or lobed, disciform; petals absent; disk absent; ovary (2)3(5)-locular, with 2 ovules per loculus; styles (2)3(5), free, thick, recurved, covering the ovary, multipartite to laciniate.Fruit drupaceous, indehiscent; mesocarp spongy; pyrenes (2)3(4), dorsally carinate and bisulcate, indurate, tardily bivalved.Seeds mostly 1 per pyrene, compressed, ecarunculate; endosperm fleshy; embryo straight; cotyledons broad, flat, green.