Annual; culms 30-150 cm high, erect or geniculately ascending, stout, simple. Leaf-blades 10-45 cm long, 3-15 mm wide, glabrous, rough; ligules up to 6 mm long. Panicle nodding (sometimes subsecund), narrowly to broadly pyramidal, 10-40 cm long and up to 20 cm wide, loose with rough spreading branches. Spikelets pendulous, 18-30 mm long, 2-3-flowered, the rhachilla articulated beneath each floret; glumes lanceolate, finely acute; lemmas 12-25 mm long, densely bearded around the callus with hairs up to 4 mm long, stiffly hairy (or completely glabrous) and finally brown in the lower two-thirds, green and rough above, unequally and shortly 2-4-toothed at the apex; awn 2.5-4 cm long, geniculate, the column dark brown.