Momordica charantia
species of plant in the family Cucurbitaceae
Momordica charantia (commonly called bitter melon, gouya, cerassee, goya, bitter apple, bitter gourd, bitter squash, balsam-pear, karela, karavila and many more names listed below) is a tropical and subtropical vine of the family Cucurbitaceae, widely grown in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean for its edible fruit. Its many varieties differ substantially in the shape and bitterness of the fruit.
Its native range is distributed from Tropical and Subtropical Old World to South Pacific.
Bitter melon originated in Africa and Asia, where it was a dry-season staple food of ǃKung hunter-gatherers. Wild or semi-domesticated variants spread across Asia in prehistory, and it was likely fully domesticated in Southeast Asia. It is widely used in the cuisines of East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Description
This herbaceous, tendril-bearing vine grows up to 5 m (16 ft) in length. It bears simple, alternate leaves 4–12 cm (1.6–4.7 in) across, with three to seven deeply separated lobes. Each plant bears separate yellow male and female flowers. In the Northern Hemisphere, flowering occurs from June to July, and fruiting from September to November.
The public source identifies “Momordica charantia” as species of plant in the family Cucurbitaceae. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Momordica, charantia and species.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q428750. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Momordica charantia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.