Elaeis oleifera is a species of palm commonly called the American oil palm. It is native to South and Central America from Honduras to northern Brazil.
Unlike its relative Elaeis guineensis, the African oil palm, it is rarely planted commercially to produce palm oil, but hybrids between the two species are, mainly in efforts to provide disease resistance and to increase the proportion of unsaturated fatty acids in the oil.
Elaeis guineensis is a species of palm commonly just called oil palm but also sometimes African oil palm or macaw-fat. The first Western person to describe it and bring back seeds was the French naturalist Michel Adanson.
It is native to west and southwest Africa, specifically the area between Angola and The Gambia; the species name, guineensis, refers to the name for the area called Guinea, and not the modern country Guinea now bearing that name. The species is also now naturalised in Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Central America, Cambodia, the West Indies, and several islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The closely related American oil palm E. oleifera and a more distantly related palm, Attalea maripa, are also used to produce palm oil.
View the full Wikipedia page for African oil palm