A novel nonlinear optical organic crystal 8-hydroxyquinoline has been grown by slow evaporation technique at room temperature (RT) using chloroform as the solvent. The solubility of 8-hydroxyquinoline in chloroform has been determined at various temperatures. The grown crystals were found to be transparent in the visible region. The grown crystals were characterized employing several techniques such as UV, FT-IR, 1H NMR spectral analysis and TG–DTA studies. Preliminary measurements indicate that the second-harmonic generation efficiency at a fundamental wavelength of 1064 nm is roughly 4.28 times that of KDP crystal.