Plants usually shrubs or trees, rarely lianas, deciduous or evergreen, usually unarmed. Leaves alternate, petiolate, without stipules; blades entire or palmately lobed, with divergent palmate venation. Flowers bracteate, pedicellate, small, often fragrant; bracts linear or subulate, deciduous; pedicels jointed; calyces with 4-10sepals united into a tube, tubes truncate or 4-10-toothed, somewhat turbinate, often grooved, peristent and adnate to the ovaries; petals 4-10, white or yellowish white, usully free, rarely united at the base, linear-oblong, erect, convergent and touching in bud, recurved to revolute at maturity; stamens 4-40, free or slightly united at the base, sometimes adnate to the petals; filaments short, arising from the disc; anthers large, linear oblong, usually basifixed, rarely dorsifixed or versatile, dehiscence introrse, longitudinal; disks usually present, conspicuous, cupular, with crenulate margins; ovaries inferior, with 1 or 2 locules, each locule with 1 seed; styles simple, filiform, stigmas capitate or clavate, simple or 2-lobed. Fruits ellipsoid-globose flattened drupes, bearing the persistent calyces and discs.
Alangium includes about 40 species. It is native to tropical and subtropical Africa, Asia, and Australia. Fossils show that it was once more widely distributed than now.