The royal tern was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1781 in his "Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux" from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the "Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle" which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name "Sterna maxima" in his catalogue of the "Planches Enluminées". The royal tern is now placed in the genus "Thalasseus" that was erected by the German zoologist Friedrich Boie in 1822.