Owing to their calcareous (calcium carbonate) skeletons, scleractinian corals are well known as “stony corals”. They have been major reef-builders since the Triassic and became dominant after the Cretaceous. Nowadays, coral reefs are of economic importance as a source for food and as recreational attraction. Corals are important to other reef species that use them as food, shelter and substrate. Due to their attractive shape and colours, corals are harvested for the aquarium trade. They are popular research objects for many marine scientists. Hence, scleractinian corals have essential ecological, economic and scientific roles. Thus, there is a need for detailed overview of their names and classification. This overview has become available through the Wordlist of Scleractinia.

Due to the application of new taxonomic methods, many scleractinian species have recently been placed in other genera and families. Other taxa have become synonymized. This continuously updated list will therefore be beneficial for users who need to know these names for science, reef conservation recreation, aquarium industry, and other purposes.

The list is produced through a strong collaboration between the two editors and the data management team at VLIZ, Belgium. The editor for azooxanthellate (deep-water) corals, Dr. Steve D. Cairns, is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC, USA) and published his first scientific paper on corals in 1977. The editor for the zooxanthellate corals (shallow-water) corals, Dr. Bert W. Hoeksema, works at Naturalis Biodiversity Center (Leiden, The Netherlands) and published his first coral paper in 1984. Both editors started to work for WoRMS in 2008.