[2] Saribus rotundifolius was first described as Corypha rotundifolia by the French Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1786.

[8] It was moved to the Saribus genus by the German-Dutch botanist Carl Ludwig Blume in a publication issued in 1838 or 1839.

[7][9] The generic epithet Saribus comes from a local name in one of the Maluku languages, as recorded by the Dutch, sariboe.

[10] It is about 2cm in diameter,[9][10] quite round,[9] and coloured brick red as it ripens, ultimately becoming black when ripe.

The native distribution stretches from Banggi Island in Sabah, Malaysia, off the north-east coastal tip of Borneo in the west, to the Raja Ampat Islands near Maluku off the north-west tip of Bird's Head Peninsula in Indonesia's West Papua province in the east.

[5] It has been introduced into the wild in Java, the Lesser Sunda islands, Peninsular Malaysia and Trinidad and Tobago.

It is usually found as a cultivated plant, but already in the 1960s in some places it has escaped into the wild, becoming locally very numerous.

[12] The lepidopteran caterpillars of the species Suastus gremius and Elymnias hypermnestra have been recorded using Saribus rotundifolius as a host plant.

It is a common landscaping plant in the Philippines, and has been widely cultivated in Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Java and elsewhere, for a long time.

[6] The foliage of the Saribus rotundifolius is the unofficial national leaf of the Philippines.