Plants perennial, cespitose, 30–100 cm; rhizomes absent. Culms erect to ascending-arching, slender, nearly terete, multiribbed. Principal leaves exceeded by culm; blades flat, linear, 1–2 mm wide, apex tapering, trigonous. Inflorescences: spikelet clusters 3–7, widely spaced, clusters loosely turbinate to hemispheric, to 1.3 cm wide. Spikelets brown to pale red-brown, lance-fusiform, 3–5.5 mm; fertile scales elliptic, 2.5–4 mm, acute, midrib short-excurrent. Flowers: perianth bristles 6, ± equaling tubercle. Fruits 1 per spikelet, (2.5–)2.7–3.3(–3.5) mm, body pale brown with yellowish center, ± broadly oblong-obovoid distal to stipe, lenticular, 1.5–2 × 0.8–1 mm; tubercle narrowly triangular subulate, (1–)1.2–1.5(–2) mm, less than 0.5 mm wide at base.
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Much like the more slender and narrow-lvd forms of no. 8 [Rhynchospora cephalantha A. Gray], but the glomerules hemispheric to broadly turbinate (the lower spikelets ascending or merely spreading), mostly 8–15 mm thick; achenes 1.4–1.8 mm, half to three-fifths as wide, the basal stipe-like part longer than in no. 8 [Rhynchospora cephalantha A. Gray]. Acid swamps and bogs on the coastal plain; N.J. to Fla.
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