The oriental trumpeter whiting is one of 29 species in the genus Sillago, which is one of three divisions of the smelt whiting family Sillaginidae.
The oriental trumpeter whiting was first officially identified and named Sillago aeolus by Jordan and Evermann in 1902 from the holotype collected in Taiwan,[REF] after a number of taxonomists had misidentified the species as Sillago macrolepis (Bleeker) or Sillago maculata (Quoy & Gaimard, 1824).