Plants trees or shrubs, diocious; trunks often with dark brown or black, hard wood. Leaves simple, nearly always alternate, entire. Inflorescences usually cymose, or in bundles or reduced to a solitary flower, axiallary or from older wood. Pistilla flowers usually larger than the staminate flowers; calyces very variable, 2-8 lobed or cup-shaped and entire, usually persistent and enlarging; corollas 3-8-lobed, also very variable; stamens 2-100, included or exserted, solitary or united in groups of 2 or more, joined to the corolla tube or free to the basel anthers (in Somaliland and Somalia) longitudinally dehiscent; pistillodes absent to wekk-developed; disk well-developed to absent; staminodes variable, absnt to well-developed; ovaries globose, ovoid, or conical, glabrous or hairy, with 3-8 carpels, each completely oor incompletely divided by a false septum; styles usually partly freerarely completely united; stigmatic regions usually fleshy and expanded. Fruits usually a 1-many seeded berry, rarely a tardily dehiscent fleshy capsule; seeds usually ellpisoid or shaped like an orange segment, vey rarely subglobose, with 2 lines raidating from the top.
Diospyros is a genus of just over 500 species. Most grow in the tropics and subtropics but a few species extend into warm temperate zones.