The spikelet is enclosed by bracts called glumes which are hardened, smooth, obtuse, blunt, distinctly veined, glabrous and winged on the margins.

The hilum, the scar where the caryopsis attached to the placenta, is point-like (punctiform) and the endosperm is covered with a mealy powder (farinose).

[11][12][13] The genus Rottboellia was named in honour of the Danish botanist Christen Friis Rottbøll (1727–1797) by Carl Linnaeus the Younger in 1781 in the publication Supplementum Plantarum.

The species can be found in a diverse array of habitats including grassland and marginal land, as well as being a major weed of perennial and rotation crops across the tropics.

[1][4] Globally there are least 18 crop species where R. cochinchinensis is considered an important weed including sugarcane (Saccharum), maize (Zea), upland rice (Oryza), cotton (Gossypium), soy (Glycine), Sorghum and peanuts (Arachis).

[1] It is now pantropical in distribution, being found across the Old World tropics from southern Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar and Indonesia to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and Australia as far as Queensland,[23] with one georeferenced record from New South Wales.

[1][23][5] Introductions are speculated to have originated from the transportation of crop products and agricultural and forestry machinery,[3][12][25] or even intentionally introduced for grazing in the Caribbean[1] The taxonomic classification of Rottboellia cochinchinensis is largely still based on the work of Clayton and Renvoize in 1986, who placed the genus within the Andropogoneae tribe of the Panicoideae, which is a subfamily within the Grasses (Family: Poaceae).

[26] The tribe was defined morphologically by many characters including fragile racemes, subtended by a leaf-sheath, which bear pairs spikelets, one fertile and sessile and the other pedicelled and barren.

Clayton and Renvoize also recognised a subtribe Rottboelliinae which included the genera Coelorachis, Hackelochloa, Hemarthria and Elionurus, amongst others[26] More recent evaluations of the Andropogoneae.

Phylogenetic methodologies have experienced difficulties in resolving evolutionary relationships within the tribe, and have pointed to rapid basal radiation [27] and/or frequent hybridisation[29] within the clade as possible causes.

[27][13][30] Skendzic et al. (2007)[27] also has Hackelochloa, Hemarthria and Elionurus as sister genera within Rottboelliinea sensu Clayton and Renvoize (1986)[26] Archaeological evidence of a Rottboellia cochinchinensis caryopsis from an Early Iron Age site on the Lulonga River in the Democratic Republic of Congo was found in the early 2010s, possibly suggesting the species native distribution covers the Old World Tropics.