Millet

Millets (/ˈmɪlɪts/) are a highly varied group of small-seeded grasses, widely grown around the world as cereal crops or grains for fodder and human food. Most millets belong to the tribe Paniceae.

Millets are important crops in the semiarid tropics of Asia and Africa, especially in India, Mali, Nigeria, and Niger, with 97% of production in developing countries. The crop is favoured for its productivity and short growing season under hot dry conditions. The millets are sometimes understood to include the widely cultivated sorghum; apart from that, pearl millet is the most commonly cultivated of the millets. Finger millet, proso millet, barnyard millet, little millet, kodo millet, browntop millet and foxtail millet are other important crop species. Millets may have been consumed by humans for about 7,000 years and potentially had "a pivotal role in the rise of multi-crop agriculture and settled farming societies".

The word millet is derived via Old French millet, millot from Latin millium, 'millet', ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *mele-, 'to crush'.

Millets are small-grained, annual, warm-weather cereals belonging to the grass family. They are highly tolerant of drought and other extreme weather conditions and have a similar nutrient content to other major cereals.

In 1753, Carl Linnaeus described foxtail millet as Panicum italicum. In 1812, Palisot de Beauvois grouped several taxa into Setaria italica.

The genus Pennisetum was divided by Otto Stapf in 1934 into the section penicillaria, with 32 species including all the cultivated ones, and four other sections. In 1977, J. Brunken and colleagues classed the wild P. violaceum as part of the cultivated species P. glaucum (pearl millet).

Finger millet was described as Eleusine coracana by Joseph Gaertner in 1788.

The millets are closely related to sorghum and maize within the PACMAD clade of grasses, and more distantly to the cereals of the BOP clade such as wheat and barley.