Carambola brightly colored and unusually shaped fruits, as well as for their attractive dark green leaves and their lavender to pink flowers. Like the bilimbi, the juice of the more acidic sour types can be used to clean rusty or tarnished metal (especially brass) as well as bleach rust stains from cloth. They may also be used as a mordant in dyeing. The Portuguese word "carambola", first known use 1598, was taken from Marathi "karambal" derived from Sanskrit "karmaphala". The carambola is known under different names in different countries. It should not be confused with the closely related bilimbi, with which
Common name languages; the word for "cat", for instance, is easily recognizable in most Germanic and many Romance languages. Many vernacular names, however, are restricted to a single country and colloquial names to local districts. Common names are used in the writings of both professionals and laymen. Lay people sometimes object to the use of scientific names over common names, but the use of scientific names can be defended, as it is in these remarks from a book on marine fish: In scientific binomial nomenclature, names commonly are derived from classical or modern Latin or Greek or Latinised forms of vernacular words