Gingival overgrowth includes a series of diseases with many clinical appearances. The pathological mechanisms being obscure there were used many terms for defining it. Thus, "gingival hyperplasia" and "gingival hypertrophy" were the definitions used to define this pathology. Therefore, the term of "gingival overgrowth" replaced in last decades the above two terms. This article have the goal of trying a classification of the entities forming the large family of gingival overgrowth.