A banana is an elongated, edible fruit – botanically a berry[1] – produced by several kinds of large treelike herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa.

This and black sigatoka threaten the production of Cavendish bananas, the main kind eaten in the Western world, which is a triploid Musa acuminata.

The inner part of the common yellow dessert variety can be split lengthwise into three sections that correspond to the inner portions of the three carpels by manually deforming the unopened fruit.

[18] The name may be derived from Antonius Musa, physician to the Emperor Augustus, or Linnaeus may have adapted the Arabic word for banana, mauz.

The APG III system assigns Musaceae to the order Zingiberales, part of the commelinid clade of the monocotyledonous flowering plants.

Some 70 species of Musa were recognized by the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families as of January 2013[update];[18] several produce edible fruit, while others are cultivated as ornamentals.

More species names were added, but this approach proved to be inadequate for the number of cultivars in the primary center of diversity of the genus, Southeast Asia.

This system eliminated almost all the difficulties and inconsistencies of the earlier classification of bananas based on assigning scientific names to cultivated varieties.

[27] Members of the "plantain subgroup" of banana cultivars, most important as food in West Africa and Latin America, correspond to this description, having long pointed fruit.

[40] Glucanase and two other proteins specific to bananas were found in dental calculus from the early Iron Age (12th century BCE) Philistines in Tel Erani in the southern Levant.

[33] Some evidence suggests bananas were known to the Indus Valley civilisation from phytoliths recovered from the Kot Diji archaeological site in Pakistan.

Writing in 1458, the Italian traveller and writer Gabriele Capodilista wrote favourably of the extensive farm produce of the estates at Episkopi, near modern-day Limassol, including the region's banana plantations.

[49] Southeast Asian banana cultivars, as well as abaca grown for fibers, were introduced to North and Central America by the Spanish from the Philippines, via the Manila galleons.

[53] North Americans began consuming bananas on a small scale at very high prices shortly after the Civil War, though it was only in the 1880s that the food became more widespread.

Plantation cultivation involved the combination of modern transportation networks of steamships and railroads with the development of refrigeration that allowed more time between harvesting and ripening.

North American shippers like Lorenzo Dow Baker and Andrew Preston, the founders of the Boston Fruit Company started this process in the 1870s, with the participation of railroad builders like Minor C. Keith.

They are grown in large quantities in India, while many other Asian and African countries host numerous small-scale banana growers who sell at least some of their crop.

[70][71] The excessive use of fertilizers contributes greatly to eutrophication in streams and lakes, harming aquatic life, while expanding banana production has led to deforestation.

[73] However, such standards are applied mainly in countries which focus on the export market, such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Guatemala; worldwide they cover only 8–10% of production.

This virulent form of Fusarium wilt has destroyed Cavendish plantations in several southeast Asian countries and spread to Australia and India.

[86] As the soil-based fungi can easily be carried on boots, clothing, or tools, the wilt spread to the Americas despite years of preventive efforts.

[99] Banana bunchy top disease symptoms include dark green streaks of variable length in leaf veins, midribs and petioles.

Since then it has been diagnosed in Central and East Africa, including the banana growing regions of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi, and Uganda.

[105] In 2024, the economist Pascal Liu of the FAO described the impact of global warming as an "enormous threat" to the world supply of bananas.

[121] In Africa, matoke bananas are cooked in a sauce with meat and vegetables such as peanuts or beans to make the breakfast dish katogo.

While generally too tough to actually be eaten, they are often used as ecologically friendly disposable food containers or as "plates" in South Asia and several Southeast Asian countries.

These banana shoots produce fibers of varying degrees of softness, yielding yarns and textiles with differing qualities for specific uses.

We Have No Bananas" was written by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn and originally released in 1923; for many decades, it was the best-selling sheet music in history.

[146] The banana's suggestively phallic shape has been exploited in artworks from Giorgio de Chirico's 1913 painting The Uncertainty of the Poet onwards.

[156] In European, British, and Australian sport, throwing a banana at a member of an opposing team has long been used as a form of racial abuse.