In 1783, the French naturalist Johann Hermann provided a formal description of the species based on the coloured plate by Daubenton and Martinet. He gave it the scientific name "Alcedo novæ Guineæ". The current genus "Dacelo" was introduced in 1815 by the English zoologist William Elford Leach, and is an anagram of "Alcedo", the Latin word for a kingfisher. The specific epithet "novaeguineae" combines the Latin "novus" for new with Guinea, based on the erroneous belief that the specimen had originated from New Guinea. For many years it was believed that the earliest description was by the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert and his scientific name "Dacelo gigas" was used in the scientific literature, but in 1926 the Australian ornithologist Gregory Mathews showed that a description by Hermann had been published earlier in the same year, 1783, and thus had precedence. The inaccurate impression of geographic distribution given by the name in current usage had not by 1977 been considered an important enough matter to force a change in favor of "D. gigas".