Salla
Salla is a wood-type name used in Gulf trade for a category of agarwood. It appears in lists of wood types and in descriptions of material offered for sale, and it is used loosely enough that the general referent can be stated while the attribution cannot. A qualified form, Baby Salla, and a near-spelling, Salda, are recorded in the same usage. Whether they are the same word written three ways, subdivisions of one name, or separate names is not established here.
Spelling, language and market
The name is written in Latin script in Gulf trade records and invoices, as Salla or salla, and the Gulf usage carries the same letters in Arabic script. It is worth separating the script from the word: the same spelling, in ordinary Arabic, is a common noun meaning a basket, and a reader meeting the word in a trade list may carry that sense into it. That ordinary sense is not the trade referent, and the two should not be allowed to blur into one another.
Attested usage
The name is used in the way this whole vocabulary is used: to name a category of wood for a buyer who already knows the market, usually alongside a qualifier that says more. It carries a general sense of a type of agarwood wood and no more that can be relied on. A buyer who needs a specific attribute should ask what the term means in that seller’s stock and what distinguishes it from the other names in the same list.
Named examples and neighbouring spellings
The usage records Baby Salla, a size-qualified form, and Salda, a near-spelling that is written with a different vowel. The three are often listed together, and a shopfront that lists them together is making a commercial arrangement rather than a classification. What would settle the relationship is a seller’s written definition, or a record in which the same material is called by two of these names, or a quotation that uses the bare name and the qualified form of one lot.
Alternative meanings
Two readings are worth keeping apart. In ordinary Arabic the word means a basket, and in several Gulf and South Asian languages the same string is also a place name, so a reader may take the term for an origin when it is a name. Separately, Salla is a common personal name, and a description in which the term stands alone may be naming a person rather than a material.
What it does not prove
The name does not establish the species, the resin content, the oil yield, the age, the size or form of the wood, or the country it came from. It does not establish a grade, and it is not a protected designation. And it does not establish that Salda is the same word, nor that Baby Salla is a subdivision of it, nor that any of them denotes a particular place.
This entry gives the general trade referent of the term and the neighbouring spellings recorded with it. It does not establish the species, grading, composition, origin or quality of any material described with it, and it does not establish a synonymy between the spellings.
- Biodiversity and application prospects of fungal endophytes in the agarwood-producing genera Aquilaria and Gyrinops (Thymelaeaceae): a reviewStates that all members of the agarwood-producing genera Aquilaria and Gyrinops are placed in CITES Appendix II. Records 92 compounds identified in agarwood, of which terpenoids are 40.22%, and names eighteen fungal genera reported to promote agarwood formation. It does not establish the quality, yield or age of any material, and it is a review rather than a regulatory instrument.
- Agarwood: A reviewStates that CITES Appendix II covers all species of Aquilaria and Gyrinops, and reports fifteen Aquilaria species distributed across the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia, from Pakistan and India through southern China into Southeast Asia. It does not establish the legal status of any individual shipment in any particular jurisdiction.
- ITTO — CITES COP examines agarwoodEstablishes that all species of Aquilaria and Gyrinops have been listed in CITES Appendix II since 2004, and that the listing followed unsustainable extraction. Establishes that the report reviews wild and planted agarwood resources, processing technologies, products and regulatory practices, and that cultivation and inoculation of agarwood species are described as relieving pressure on wild populations in natural forests. It does not state what an Appendix II listing requires for trade, and it does not establish the origin, age or quality of any material.
OudGuide editorial review · 2026-10-20
Reviewed against the cited sources for the general referent of the term, and checked for a question-specific answer. The precise attribution was checked against general trade usage rather than against a single market, and each entry states which parts are local rather than general.