Silani
Silani is a name recorded in Gulf and South Asian agarwood trade. The general referent can be stated: it is used to name a category of material, listed among the other material and wood-type names. Two neighbouring spellings appear in the same usage — Seylani and Malino — and neither their relation to this word nor to each other is established here. The letters suggest a place to an English reader, and that reading is available; it is not established as an origin.
Spelling, language and market
The name is written in Latin script in trade documents, as Silani, and the Gulf usage carries the same letters in Arabic script. A neighbouring form is written Seylani, and another is Malino. In a vocabulary that travels largely in writing, differences of this size can be a naming distinction, a transliteration habit, or a different house's usage, and the trade records carry the forms without a note saying which is which.
Attested usage
The name appears in lists of material types and in short descriptions of material offered for sale, with the usual qualifiers attached — an area, a treatment, or a use. Sellers do not use it consistently across the trade, and a lot described with it in one market may be described differently in another. Where the word decides what the buyer is getting, the definition has to be obtained in writing.
Named examples and neighbouring spellings
Seylani and Malino are the neighbouring records, and the wider lists they sit in also contain Mori, Salla and Hindi Muri. Whether the three are subdivisions of one name or separate names is not established here. Three ordinary documents would settle it: the supplier's own written definition, a batch record in which one material carries more than one of the names, and a quotation in which two of them are used of different lots with the difference explained.
Alternative meanings
The string is close to a European place name, and to other names in the trade, so a reader may take it for an origin, a brand, a house name or a personal name. All of these readings are open on the letters alone. A trade name that happens to resemble a place is common in this vocabulary, and the resemblance carries no information about where the material came from.
What it does not prove
The name does not establish the country of origin, and it is not a protected designation. It does not establish the species, the resin content, the oil yield, the age, the size or form of the material, and it establishes no grade. It establishes no relationship to Seylani or to Malino.
This entry gives the general trade referent of the term. It does not establish a country of origin, a species, a grading, a composition or a quality for any material described with it, and it does not establish a relationship between the neighbouring 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.
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.