Calabash fruits have a variety of shapes: they can be huge and rounded, small and bottle-shaped, or slim and serpentine, and they can grow to be over a metre long.

[8] The English word calabash is loaned from Middle French: calebasse, which in turn derived from Spanish: calabaza meaning gourd or pumpkin.

[9][10][11] The English word is cognate with Catalan: carabassa ("pumpkin; orange colour"), Galician: cabaza ("gourd, pumpkin, squash; calabash (container)"), Occitan: calebasso, carabasso, carbasso, Portuguese: cabaça ("gourd; calabash (container)") and Sicilian: caravazza (and caramazza).

[citation needed] The bottle gourd has been recovered from archaeological contexts in China and Japan dating to c. 8,000–9,000 BP,[12] whereas in Africa, despite decades of high-quality archaeobotanical research, the earliest record of its occurrence remains the 1884 report of a bottle gourd being recovered from a 12th Dynasty tomb at Thebes dating to ca.

[12] When considered together, the genetic and archaeological information points toward L. siceraria being independently brought under domestication first in Asia, and more than 4,000 years later, in Africa.

[12] The bottle gourd is a commonly cultivated plant in tropical and subtropical areas of the world, and was eventually domesticated in southern Africa.

[13] This apparent wild plant produces thinner-walled fruit that, when dried, would not endure the rigors of use on long journeys as a water container.

Today's gourd may owe its tough, waterproof wall to selection pressures over its long history of domestication.

Polynesian specimens of calabash were found to have genetic markers suggesting hybridization from Asian and American cultivars.

[15] In Europe,[16] Walahfrid Strabo (808–849), abbot and poet from Reichenau and advisor to the Carolingian kings, discussed the gourd in his Hortulus as one of the 23 plants of an ideal garden.

The bottle gourd was theorized to have drifted across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to South America, but in 2005 a group of researchers suggested that it may have been domesticated earlier than food crops and livestock and, like dogs, was brought into the New World at the end of the ice age by the native hunter-gatherer Paleo-Indians, which they based on a study of the genetics of archaeological samples.

This study purportedly showed that gourds in American archaeological finds were more closely related to Asian variants than to African ones.

Researchers more completely examined the plastid genomes of a broad sample of bottle gourds, and concluded that North and South American specimens were most closely related to wild African variants and could have drifted over the ocean several or many times, as long as 10,000 years ago.

The tetracyclic triterpenoid cucurbitacins present in fruits and vegetables of the cucumber family are responsible for the bitter taste, and could cause stomach ulcers.

In Central America the seeds of the bottle gourd are toasted and ground with other ingredients (including rice, cinnamon, and allspice) to make one type of the drink horchata.

In Japan, it is commonly sold in the form of dried, marinated strips known as kanpyō and is used as an ingredient for making makizushi (rolled sushi).

Fresh calabash flesh, scraped out, seeded, salted and squeezed to draw out moisture, is called baksok.

In Karnataka, bottle gourd is called Sorekayi and is used to prepare palya (stir-fry) and Sambaru (a south Indian stew).

In Sicily, mostly in the Palermo area, a traditional soup called "Minestra di Tenerumi" is made with the tender leaves of var.

Sometimes large calabashes are simply hollowed, dried and used as percussion instruments by striking them, especially by Fulani, Songhai, Gur-speaking and Hausa peoples.

The hulu was believed to absorb negative, earth-based qi (energy) that would otherwise affect health, and is a traditional Chinese medicine cure.

Li Tieguai's gourd was said to carry medicine that could cure any illness and never emptied, which he dispensed to the poor and needy.

Calabash gourds were also grown in earthen molds to form different shapes with imprinted floral or arabesque designs.

Instruments that look like guitars are made of wood, but can have a calabash resonator at the end of the strings table, called toomba.

[43] These toombas are made of dried calabash gourds, using special cultivars that were originally imported from Africa and Madagascar.

These gourds are valuable items and they are carefully tended; for example, they are sometimes given injections to stop worms and insects from making holes in them while they are drying.

In parts of India a dried, unpunctured gourd is used as a float (called surai-kuduvai in Tamil) to help people learn to swim in rural areas.

[48] In 2012, Teófilo García of Abra in Luzon, an expert artisan who makes the Ilocano tamburaw variant using calabash, was awarded by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts with the "Gawad sa Manlilikha ng Bayan" (National Living Treasures Award).

He was cited for his dedication to practising and teaching the craft as an intangible cultural heritage of the Philippines under the Traditional Craftsmanship category.

[35] On plantations that held enslaved African Americans, the Calabash symbolized freedom—as alluded to in the song "Follow the Drinking Gourd" that referenced the Big Dipper constellation that was used to guide the Underground Railroad.