Culms 21-62 cm. Blades 22-50 cm long, 6-10 mm wide. Branches slim, 4-17 cm long, 5-7 mm wide. Spikelets 5-8 mm long, 3-4 mm wide, with 2-6 florets, disarticulating at maturity. Seeds oblong, surfaces shallowly ridged, uniformly granular.

This weedy subspecies hybridizes freely with the cultivated subsp. coracana. It tends to have more slender branches than subsp. coracana (5-7 mm wide rather than 7-15 mm), which led to its previous inclusion in E. indica.