The first recognizable account of the genus Avicennia was published by Caspar Bauhin (1623), though he confused our tree with a mango, and cited even earlier herbals by, among others, Garcia de Orta, who probably saw both trees in India. A few decades later the white mangrove was well illustrated in Van Rheede's (1678-1693) Hortus Malabaricus, and this work is the source of the generic name used by Linnaeus (1747, 1754). That the earliest published reference should be to an Indian Ocean species and not to an Atlantic one is not remarkable when one considers the route that the early Portuguese and Dutch traders used between Europe and India. Their last landfall in the Atlantic was Madeira, the Azores or the Canaries, from where they went almost to Brazil (but not landing anywhere) before turning south-eastwards and rounding the Cape. They thus sailed past all the Avicennia localities in the Atlantic without stopping, and only made landfall in the Indian Ocean. However, other early explorers sailed to the Caribbean, and A. germinans (L.) L. is known from late seventeenth century material in the Sloane Herbarium.

The genus Avicennia is named after one of the greatest luminaries of mediaeval Islamic science, the Persian physician, naturalist, philosopher and mathematician Abu Ali Husain Ibn Abd Allah (Abu Ali Alhosain Ibn Sina, 980-1037 AD). Later generations of Western academics Latinized his name as 'Avicenna'. The specific epithet marina refers to the habitat of the white mangrove, at the edge of the sea.