Red-billed quelea province in today's Sudan. "Red-billed quelea" has been designated the official name by the International Ornithological Committee (IOC). Other names in English include black-faced dioch, cardinal, common dioch, Latham's weaver-bird, pink-billed weaver, quelea finch, quelea weaver, red-billed dioch, red-billed weaver, Russ' weaver, South-African dioch, Sudan dioch and Uganda dioch. Based on recent DNA analysis, the red-billed quelea is the sister group of a clade that contains both other remaining species of the genus "Quelea", namely the cardinal quelea ("Q. cardinalis") and the red-headed quelea ("Q. erythrops"). The genus belongs to the group of true weavers (subfamily Ploceinae), and is most
Red-billed quelea "aethiopica". Linnaeus himself did not explain the name "quelea". "Quelea quelea" is locally called "kwelea domo-jekundu" in Swahili, "enzunge" in Kwangali, "chimokoto" in Shona, "inyonyane" in Siswati, "thaha" in Sesotho and "ndzheyana" in the Tsonga language. M.W. Jeffreys suggested that the term came from medieval Latin "qualea", meaning "quail", linking the prodigious numbers of queleas to the hordes of quail that fed the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt. The subspecies "lathamii" is probably named in honor of the ornithologist John Latham. The name of the subspecies "aethiopica" refers to Ethiopia, and its type was collected in the neighbouring Sennar