Why Is It Called a White Rhino? The Name Myth Explained

What color are white rhinos really?

A white rhino is gray, ranging from slate gray to a yellowish or brownish gray. Its thick skin is almost hairless, so what you see is bare skin.

In the field, though, a rhino’s color is mostly borrowed. Rhinos roll in mud wallows to cool off and protect their skin from sun and biting insects. When the mud dries, the animal takes on the color of the local soil. A rhino in a reserve with red earth looks rusty red; one that has wallowed in pale clay or calcrete can look almost whitish; one that is wet from rain looks dark. This is true of both African species, which is why color is useless for telling them apart.

The popular story: “wijd” means wide

The explanation you will find in many guidebooks goes like this. Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa described the grazing rhino by its wide mouth, using the word wijd (Dutch) or wyd (Afrikaans), meaning “wide”. English-speaking settlers heard it as “white”, and the name stuck. The second species, by contrast, then became the “black” rhino.

The story is attractive because the white rhino’s most obvious feature really is its broad, square upper lip, which it uses like a lawnmower to crop short grass.

Why historians doubt the “wide” story

There are three main problems with it:

• No written evidence. Reviews of old Dutch and Afrikaans literature about rhinos have found no record of the animal being called the “wide” rhino. If the word was ever used, it was only in speech, which cannot be checked.
• The translation went the other way. Today the Afrikaans name is witrenoster, literally “white rhinoceros”. This looks like a translation of the English name into Afrikaans, not the source of it, suggesting the English name came first.
• It cannot be tested. A word used only in everyday speech some two centuries ago leaves no trace, so the story can be neither confirmed nor ruled out. At best it is a guess.

Other ideas have been suggested, for example that the first animals Europeans described looked pale after wallowing in light-colored soil. None of these can be proven either. The honest answer is that the origin of the name is unknown.

How did the black rhino get its name?

The black rhino is not black, and it is no darker than the white rhino. Its name was most likely chosen simply to contrast with the white rhino, the way people pair opposites. Some people suggest that black rhinos looked darker because of the soil in the areas where Europeans first saw them, but again there is no firm evidence.

Because both names are misleading, scientists often use descriptive alternatives:

Square lips and hooked lips: the real difference

If you want to tell the two species apart, look at the mouth, not the skin. The white rhino’s wide, flat lip is built for cropping short grass, so it walks with its huge head held low, close to the ground. The black rhino has a pointed upper lip that works almost like a finger, wrapping around twigs and leaves and pulling them into the mouth. It usually holds its head higher, at the level of the bushes it feeds on.

Other clues follow from the lip. White rhinos are bigger, have a pronounced hump on the neck and long, tube-shaped ears, and live in open grassland, often in small groups. Black rhinos are smaller, more solitary and prefer thick bush. The full side-by-side guide is in white rhino vs black rhino.

What the scientific name says

The white rhino’s scientific name avoids the color problem altogether. Ceratotherium, coined by the zoologist John Edward Gray in 1868, comes from Greek words for “horn” and “beast”. The species name simum comes from the Greek simos, “flat-nosed”, referring to the broad, flat snout. The black rhino is Diceros bicornis, which means roughly “two-horned” twice over, from Greek and Latin.

Does the name matter?

The confusing names are a small part of a bigger story. Both African rhinos were hunted almost to extinction, and both are still targeted by poachers for their horns. Whatever we call them, the white rhino is listed as Near Threatened and the black rhino as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. Knowing how to tell them apart by lip and behavior, not color, helps visitors on safari understand which species they are seeing and why each needs a different kind of habitat to survive.