Bamboos are a diverse group of mostly evergreen perennial flowering plants making up the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family in the case of Dendrocalamus sinicus individual culms reaching a length of 46 meters up to 36 centimeters in thickness and a weight of up to 450 kilograms. The internodes of bamboos can also be of great length. Kinabalu Chloa wrayi has internodes up to 2.5 meters in length. and Arthrostylidium schomburgkii with lower internodes up to 5 meters in length exceeded in length only by papyrus. By contrast the culms of the tiny bamboo Raddiella vanessiae of the savannas of French Guiana are only 10 20 millimeters in length by about two millimeters in width. The origin of the word bamboo is uncertain but it probably comes from the Dutch or Portuguese language which originally borrowed it from Malay or Kannada.