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Female flowers pendulous; pedicels 1 mm long, extending to 3 mm in fruit; sepals 5, 1.3–1.5 × 1 mm, accrescent to up to 2.5 × 1.5 mm in fruit, elliptic-ovate or-obovate, slightly fused at the base, pale greenish-yellow with a broad white border; disk 0.6 mm in diameter, very shallowly 5-lobed, flat, thin; ovary 0.5 mm in diameter, sessile, subglobose, smooth; styles 3, 0.2 mm long, ± united at the base, divergent, 2-lobed, stigmas shortly cylindric.
Male flowers: pedicels c. 1 mm long; sepals 5, 1.25 × 1 mm, obovate-suborbicular; disk glands 5, free, 0.25 mm across, irregularly lobulate, shallowly tuberculate; stamens 3, filaments united into a column 0.5 mm high, anthers 0.3 mm across, broadly ovoid, free, reflexed, apically and obliquely dehiscent.
Scale leaves c. 1 mm long, linear-lanceolate, light brown at first, later darkening; stipules 1.25 × 0.75 mm, obliquely triangular-lanceolate, not or slightly adaxially auriculate, sometimes replaced by foliage leaves at the lower nodes.
Seeds 1.5–1.6 × 1.2 × 1.1–1.2 mm, segmentiform, mid-to dark brown, with 17–19 longitudinal ridges on the dorsal facet, and 14–16 concentric ridges on each ventral facet, with innumerable transverse striae between them.
Male flowers in few-flowered cymules in the axils of the lowest quarter to one-third of the lateral shoots, female flowers solitary in the axils of the upper two-thirds to three-quarters of the lateral shoots.
Fruit 2 × 2.5–2.8 mm, trigonous-subglobose, ± smooth, fissuring on drying, often tinged reddish-purple at the apex, ± enclosed by the persistent sepals.
An erect annual herb up to 65 cm tall, sometimes much-branched, glabrous, monoecious.
Lateral shoots up to 20 cm long.
Lead shoots angular.
