See text Hypoplectrodes is a genus of marine ray-finned fish belonging to the family Anthiadidae.

[3] Gill originally merely assigned a type species (Plectropoma nigrorobrum) to the genus, but did not include a diagnosis of its characteristics.

[2][4] Notably, the British zoologist George Albert Boulenger in the first volume of his Catalogue of the Perciform Fishes in the British Museum acknowledged Gill's earlier name, but because of the absence of a diagnosis, Boulenger instead preferred to use the later name Gilbertia, coined by the American ichthyologists David Starr Jordan and Carl H. Eigenmann in 1890.

In 1896, after reading Boulenger's book, Gill admitted to not including a diagnosis in his original paper and that he had indeed even forgotten that he had ever named the genus, but he clarified that a diagnosis for Hypoplectrodes had actually been published in an 1871 paper by the Cuban zoologist Felipe Poey, which Gill had provided via personal correspondence in response to a request by the former author.

[1][2] Members of the genus Hypoplectrodes are characterized by the absence of scales on the maxilla, one to three antrorse spines on the preopercle of the gill cover, three predorsal bones, and 26 to 28 vertebrae (usually 27, only very rarely 26).