Monoecious or functionally dioecious trees, shrubs or root climbers, twiners and hemi-epiphytes, often with adventitious roots. Leaves simple, alternate or rarely opposite, entire or serrate, palmately lobed, obtuse or acute or acuminate, deciduous or persistent; stipules connate (single) or free lateral closing the terminal bud, caducous, leaving annular scars. Inflorescence axillary or cauliflorous, globular or pyriform rarely oblong, fleshy hollow hypanthodium with a terminal ostiole with scales spreading across outside or pointing vertically downwards. Flowers numerous, borne on inner side of hypanthodium, of 4 types (male, female, gall and sterile male or neuter), sessile or pedicellate, bracteate. Male flowers: ostiolar in one or several rows or dispersed among female within; calyx 2-6-lobed or partite, lobes imbricate, sometimes reduced scales; stamens 1.2 (-3.6), filaments upright, anthers ovate or oblong, dithecous with apical crescentric or equatorial transverse dehiscence or tetrathecous with longitudinally introrse dehiscence; pistillode vestigial or absent. Female flowers often numerous, borne away from the ostiole, usually dispersed; calyx variable in size and number, sometimes reduced or wanting; ovary straight or, oblique, unilocular, with solitary, pendulous bitegmic ovule; style eccentric or subapical to gynobasic, stigma bifid or simple; staminodes absent. Gall flowers: abundant and disperse, each with sterile often pedicellate ovary, enclosing one developing insect. Neuter flowers: a few or absent, with calyx only. Fruit ± fleshy, smooth or ribbed, with or without sclerotic cells, sometimes orificially splitting, figs enclosing a large number of thinly pulpy, white or brown, minute, 1-seeded druplets or achenes. Seeds often compressed, with membranous coat and incurved embryo, often exalbuminous.