Robert Brown recorded 31 species of "Banksia" in his 1810 work "Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen", and used the epithet "oblongifolia" in his taxonomic arrangement, placing the taxon in the subgenus "Banksia verae", the "True Banksias", because the inflorescence is a typical "Banksia" flower spike. He recognised "B. salicifolia" as the same species at this point, but was unsure whether Salisbury's "B. aspleniifolia" belonged under the same name. By the time Carl Meissner published his 1856 arrangement of the genus, there were 58 described "Banksia" species. Meissner divided Brown's "Banksia verae", which had been renamed "Eubanksia" by Stephan Endlicher in 1847, into four series based on leaf properties. He followed Brown in using the name "B. oblongifolia", and placed it in the series "Salicinae".