 The whitetip reef shark was first described by the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell as Carcharias obesus, in the 1837 Fische des Rothen Meeres (Fishes of the Red Sea). His choice of the specific epithet obesus was curious, given that this shark is actually quite slender. Later in 1837, Johannes Müller and Friedrich Henle moved this species into its own genus Triaenodon, from the Greek triaena meaning "trident", and odon meaning "tooth". As Rüppell did not originally designate a holotype, in 1960 a 31-cm-long specimen caught off Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was made the species lectotype. Other common names for this shark include blunthead shark, light-tip shark, reef whitetip shark, and whitetip shark.
