The name of the genus is derived from the Greek "brachys", short, and "chiton", tunic, a reference to the loose seed coats. "Brachychiton" was for many years misconstrued as being of neuter gender—first by the genus describers Heinrich Wilhelm Schott and Stephan Endlicher and later by von Mueller and others—with the specific names then incorrectly amended. Thus the bottle tree's binomial was recorded as "Brachychiton rupestre", now regarded as an orthographical variant. Besides "Queensland bottle tree", common names for the species include "narrow-leaved bottle tree" and "bottle tree".