Soft wooded, dioecious or monoecious, small palm-like trees with succulent stem and milky sap, trunks mostly unbranched. Leaves alternate, often very large in terminal crown, palmately lobed, with long, hollow petioles, exstipulate, rarely stipules when present are spiny. Inflorescences axillary. Flowers unisexual, plants mostly dioecious, rarely bisexual. Female flowers large, usually solitary or aggregated in short corymbose cymes on short peduncles. Male flowers in long drooping cymose panicles. Calyx small, 5 lobed, lobes small, connate basally. Petals 5, free or united, tube long in male and short in female flowers. Stamens 10, in 2 series or 5 in 1 series, epipetalous, inserted in throat of corolla tube; filaments free, connate basally; anthers bithecous, introrse. In female flowers carpels 5, syncarpous, ovary superior, 1-5-loculed, placentation parietal or axile, ovules numerous; styles 1 or 5, free to partly joined, apical; stigmas 5, papillate, dry. Fruit large, succulent, indehiscent berry. Seeds numerous, enclosed in sweet pulp.

6 genera and 42 species

Carica papaya