Plants annual or pernnial herbs, shrublets, or subshrubs, sometimes spinescent, with white latex, usually glabrous. Inflorescences terminal, of few to many capitula, in paniculate clusters, these sometimes pendent or elongate. Capitula with 8-45 flowers; involucres narrow; phyllaries mostly with scarious margins, in a few outer series and an inner series of distinctly longer, equal, linear-lanceolate phyllaries; receptacles without bracts. Flowers all ligulate, 5-toothed, bisexual, usually of some shade of yellow, sometimes blue to pale pink; anthers with sagittate bases and rounded tips. Achenes usually 2-6 mm long, cylindric to subfusiform, the marginal ones somethat curved and flattened; pappuses persistent or deciduous, either of numerous uniform bristlesthese varying from numerous outer downy hairs and fewer inner bristles to a single whorl off coarse barbellate bristles, both bristles and hairs scabrous.
Launaea is a genus of about 55 species. It is mainly African but also grows from southwestern to southern and central Asia and has 6 species in the Mediterranean plus one in western Australia. There are 9 species in Somaliland and Somalia. The species treated as Prenanthes somaliensis in the Flora of Somalia is now being treated by POWO (2022) as a synonym of Launaea cornuta.
Launaea differs from Lactuca in having achenes that are neither beaked nor attenuate at maturity.