Leaf Shapes: A Leaf's Name Is a Phrase, Not a Single Word

Spec card

Term

Leaf-shape terms in four word classes: shape (with tip and base), margin, venation and divisionSource: Jackson 1928; Gray 1879

Example species

Ginkgo biloba (ginkgo): fan-shaped blade with close, forking veinsSource: Flora of China vol. 4 (Ginkgoaceae); WCVP (Kew); World Flora Online

Structure

Leaf blade (lamina)Source: Jackson 1928

Not to be confused with

A leaflet of a compound leafSource: Gray 1879

Diagrams

Plates 1–6

Download this card as CSV leaf-shapes-spec-card.csv data: B. D. Jackson (1928) and A. Gray (1879), retrieved 2026-10-21; Flora of China vol. 4, Ginkgoaceae (taxon 10370), retrieved 2026-10-21; WCVP (Kew), CC BY 3.0, doi:10.34885/egs6-cp24, retrieved 2026-10-21; World Flora Online Plant List 2026-06 (CC0), retrieved 2026-10-21

Flora of China does not describe a ginkgo leaf with one shape word. Its entry for the ginkgo family calls the leaf of Ginkgo biloba, the ginkgo, flabellate (fan-shaped), broadly cuneate at the base and entire at the margin, with close veins that fork in pairs and an apex that is two-lobed or notched.

In botany, leaf shapes are named part by part, and a whole leaf is described by the phrase those part names make. This guide sorts those terms into four word classes, a system it calls leaf grammar: shape (the outline, with its tip and base), margin, venation and division. Its definitions of 55 terms follow two public-domain reference books, Asa Gray's textbook of 1879 and B. D. Jackson's glossary of 1928. Each term is drawn from its definition on Plates 1 to 6 and paired with a species whose Flora of China treatment, or that of its genus or family, uses that word or a close variant; how the drawings are checked is set out in Sources and Standards.

Download Download the terms table (CSV) leaf-shapes-terms.csv data: definitions after B. D. Jackson, A Glossary of Botanic Terms, 4th ed. (1928), and A. Gray, Structural Botany (1879), computed 2026-10-21; Flora of China (eFloras), volume, page and taxon references only, retrieved 2026-10-21; WCVP (Kew), CC BY 3.0, doi:10.34885/egs6-cp24, retrieved 2026-10-21; World Flora Online Plant List 2026-06 (CC0), retrieved 2026-10-21

How to spell a leaf

Gray wrote in 1879 that "a word or two, or a short phrase" could describe even a complex leaf. The phrase is built from the blade, the flat, expanded part of the leaf. Shape covers its outline, and two shape terms describe its ends: the tip, or apex, and the base, where the blade meets the leaf stalk. Margin is the edge and venation the arrangement of the veins, while division says whether the blade is one piece or cut into parts.

Look at the leaf of European beech, Fagus sylvatica, in the photo below. Find the outline first and ask where it is widest. Then check the two ends, run your eye along the edge, follow the side veins out from the midrib, and see whether the blade is whole or cut.

For most leaves, one term from each class gives a description that another reader can check against the leaf. Leaf arrangement on the stem, called phyllotaxis, is not one of the classes: it describes where leaves sit, not the leaf itself, and its spirals are the subject of Fibonacci in Nature.

Illustration

Shape: where the blade is widest

Many outline terms record where the blade is widest. An ovate blade is broadest toward the stalk and an obovate one toward the tip; elliptic and oblong blades are widest across the middle. An oblong blade, though, keeps almost parallel sides. Linear and acicular leaves are narrow from end to end, so the widest-point test hardly applies.

Some of these words have shifted in meaning. Jackson's 1928 glossary notes that Linnaeus used lanceolate for a leaf with nearly matching ends, while by Jackson's day the base was usually a little broader, with the greatest width about a third of the way up. Gray allows either reading, and adds that anyone who keeps the narrow, evenly tapering sense has no need for oblanceolate. Jackson is blunter: strictly, he writes, such a leaf cannot exist, but the word is used for blades that taper more toward the base.

A second group of outlines is defined by lobes beside the stalk. They are rounded in a cordate leaf, and a reniform leaf is like a cordate one but rounder and broader than long. The lobes are aimed back toward the stalk in a sagittate leaf and spread outward in a hastate one. In a peltate leaf, such as the garden nasturtium's, the stalk joins the underside of the blade instead of its edge.

Printed plates of leaf outlines are older than either reference book. The oldest printed plate on this page is the first plate, marked Tab. I, in Linnaeus's "Philosophia Botanica" of 1751, which sets out 62 numbered figures and is signed by its draughtsman, J. G. Hallman.

Tip and base

Gray's textbook uses one set of words for both ends of a blade. Acuminate, acute, obtuse, truncate, retuse and emarginate can each describe a tip or a base, while obcordate, mucronate and cuspidate apply to the tip only. In this guide rounded and truncate appear in both rows of Plate 2, and cordate names a base as well as a whole outline.

Look closely at the very end of the blade. An acuminate tip narrows gradually into a drawn-out point, while an acute tip meets at a sharp angle without one; a notch is emarginate when it is distinct and retuse when it is shallow in a rounded tip. At the other end, cuneate sides run to the stalk in straight lines. An attenuate base tapers down into the stalk.

Margins

The margin is the edge of the blade, and many margin terms describe teeth: their size, direction and shape. Serrate teeth point toward the tip like the teeth of a saw, and serrulate ones are the same but small. Crenate teeth are rounded, like scallops. An entire margin is even, with no teeth at all.

Direction is where the two old books part company. Gray keeps dentate for teeth that stick out without pointing toward the tip, and this guide follows him; Jackson defines dentate as "toothed, especially with salient teeth directed forward", which leaves little room between it and serrate. Undulate drifted too. For Gray it is an edge that bends slightly in and out, a gentler sinuate, while Jackson cites other authors for whom a margin can be sinuate without being undulate, and a margin that is not undulate is flat.

One species can need more than one margin word. Flora of China gives the margin of che qian, Plantago asiatica, as entire, repand, serrate or dentate, and the tea plant's as serrate to serrulate. Sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa, is not covered by Flora of China, so the photo below carries no margin term; follow one edge from stalk to tip and compare it with Plate 3.

Veins

Gray sorts leaf veins on two levels. A leaf is either parallel-veined, with simple ribs running side by side, usually from base to tip, or netted, with veins that branch and join into a network. Netted leaves then split into pinnately veined, with side veins off one midrib like the barbs of a feather, and palmately veined, with several main ribs spreading from the top of the stalk like fingers. In that scheme pinnate and palmate are kinds of netted venation, which is why reticulate sits on a different axis from them in the table below.

In Gray's account, parallel veins are a tendency of whole groups of plants: he calls them especially characteristic of the monocotyledons, plants with a single seed leaf in the embryo, and also of the gymnosperm trees. Flora of China's account of the grass family gives parallel veins, sometimes with cross-connecting veinlets. Where the monocots sit among the land plants is shown in Plant Tree of Life.

The ginkgo shows how far the vocabulary can vary for one set of veins. Gray files it with the fan palms as flabellinerved, with straight ribs radiating from the top of the stalk; Jackson calls its venation diadromous, a fan-shaped pattern; and Flora of China describes the veins as parallel, close and dichotomous. The ginkgo's place on the tree of life, and why that tree has no rungs to rank it on, are covered in Ladder of Progress.

Lobed or compound?

Division measures how deep the cuts go. Gray's scale runs from lobed, cut no more than halfway, through cleft and parted, to divided, where the cuts sever the blade into distinct parts. In Jackson's glossary pinnatifid means pinnately cleft, and pinnatisect means cut right down to the central axis. Once the pieces are separate blades on a common stalk, the leaf is compound and the pieces are leaflets.

To tell a whole leaf from one leaflet, look for the bud: Gray's 1879 textbook notes that a bud usually sits in the axil of a leaf, the angle where the leaf stalk meets the stem. Follow the stalk back to the stem. If the bud sits below a whole set of blades, they are leaflets of one compound leaf. Gray also warns that the line between simple and compound "cannot be both natural and absolute", though most leaves leave no doubt.

The English oak in the photo below has a simple, lobed blade. Flora of China describes Quercus robur with five to seven rounded or retuse lobes on each side and a base that is narrowly rounded to auriculate.

Terms people mix up

Ovate and obovate are mirror images. Find the widest point, then see which end it is nearer: nearer the stalk is ovate, nearer the tip is obovate. The prefix "ob-" means inverse in Jackson's glossary, and it works the same way in obcordate and oblanceolate.

Serrate and dentate are both toothed. In Gray's usage, followed here, serrate teeth lean toward the tip like a saw and dentate teeth point straight out, though Jackson's 1928 definition of dentate does not draw that line.

A lobed leaf and a compound leaf can look alike from a distance. A lobed blade is one continuous piece, however deep the cuts. In a compound leaf the leaflets are separate blades, and Gray notes that they may sit directly on the common stalk or have small stalks of their own; either way, the bud sits below the whole leaf.

When one word is not enough

Most leaves fit the grammar, but some resist a single phrase. One plant can carry more than one leaf form: Flora of China describes ginkgo leaves on long shoots as split by a deep notch into two lobes, and those on short shoots as notched at the apex.

A hyphen or a range is part of the grammar too: it tells the reader that the leaf sits between two words. Flora of China joins terms this way when a leaf falls between two of them, describing the tea plant's blade as elliptic, oblong-elliptic or oblong, and the lamb's quarters blade as rhombic-ovate to broadly lanceolate.

Sources

1. Jackson, B. D. (1928). A Glossary of Botanic Terms with Their Derivation and Accent, 4th edition, revised and enlarged. London: Gerald Duckworth; New York: Hafner Publishing. Reprinted January 1953. https://archive.org/details/glossaryofbotani1928jack entries cited by page in the terms table, 4th edition (1953 reprint); p. 106 checked on the printed page
2. Gray, A. (1879). Gray's Botanical Text-Book, 6th edition, vol. 1: Structural Botany, or Organography on the Basis of Morphology. New York: American Book Company (later printing of the edition copyrighted 1879). https://archive.org/details/graysbotanicalte01gray pp. 43 and 90-101 (leaf venation, outline, extremity, margin, lobation and compound leaves); pp. 98 and 100 checked on the printed page
3. Flora of China, online edition at eFloras.org. Species, genus and family treatments cited by volume, page and taxon number in the terms table and on this page. http://www.efloras.org/flora_page.aspx?flora_id=2 leaf descriptions in 40 treatments (33 species, 4 genera, 3 families), cited in the terms table and on this page
4. Linnaeus, C. (1751). Philosophia Botanica, 1st edition, Tab. I, leaf figures drawn by J. G. Hallman. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philosophia_botanica_1751_Tab_1.JPG plate image only, as reproduced on Wikimedia Commons
5. The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP), version 16.0 (2026-06-04). Facilitated by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. CC BY 3.0. doi:10.34885/egs6-cp24. https://doi.org/10.34885/egs6-cp24 names file: accepted status, authors and IPNI identifiers for the 40 species named on this page Text licence: CC BY 3.0
6. World Flora Online Plant List, version 2026-06 (CC0). World Flora Online Consortium. doi:10.5281/zenodo.7460141. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7460141 name records for the 40 species named on this page
7. English Wikipedia, articles on the example species in the tables on this page, consulted for English common names only (read 2026-10-21); the article behind each name is listed per row in the terms table (CSV, column common_name_source). https://en.wikipedia.org/ lead sections of the species articles; names summarized here
8. English Wikipedia, "Fagus sylvatica" (read 2026-10-21). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_sylvatica lead section; the common name European beech, summarized here
9. English Wikipedia, "Sweet chestnut" (read 2026-10-21). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_chestnut lead section; the common name sweet chestnut for Castanea sativa, summarized here

In the next bed:

• Inflorescence Types: flowers are read the same way, part by part, and the first flower to open is the clue.
• Types of Tea: the tea plant's elliptic, serrate leaf goes down six processing paths.

Related

• Fibonacci in Nature: The Sunflowers That Break the Sequence Deep explainer
• Inflorescence Types: The First Flower to Open Is the Clue Specimen entry

Cite this page

Botany for the Curious. “Leaf Shapes: A Leaf's Name Is a Phrase, Not a Single Word.” Published 2026-10-22; last substantive revision 2026-10-22. https://botanyforthecurious.com/forms/leaf-shapes/ (accessed: add the date you read it).

Published

22 October 2026

Last substantive revision

22 October 2026