The Tibesti Mountains are named for the Toubou people also written Tibu or Tubu, that inhabit the area. In the Kanuuri language , tu means "rock" or "mountain" and ( bu) means "a person" or "dweller," and thus Toubou roughly translates to "people of the mountains" and Tibesti to "place where the mountain people live."
Most of the mountain names are derived from arabic as well as the Tedaga and Dazaga languages. The term ehi refers to peaks and rocky hills, emi to larger mountains, era to craters and tarso to high plateaus or gently sloping mountains. For example, the Ehi Mousgou is a 2,849-metre (9,347 ft) stratovolcano near Tarso Voon; likewise, Era Kohor is a crater on top of Emi Koussi. The name Toussidé means "that which killed the Tou," as in the Toubou, reflecting the danger of the still active volcano. The name of Bardaï, the principal town in the range, means "cold" in Chadian Arabic , because of its low nocturnal temperatures. In the Tedaga language, the town is known as Goumodi, which means "red pass," signifying the color of the mountains at dusk.
The Tibesti mountains lie on the border between Chad and Libya, straddling the Chadian regions of Borkou and Tibisti and the Libyan districts of Murzuq and Kufra, around 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) north of N djamena and 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) south-southeast of Tripoli. The range is adjacent to Niger and located approximately halfway between the Mediterranean Sea and Lack Chad , just south of the Tropic of cancer The East African Rift is 1,900 km (1,200 mi) to the east and the Cameroon Line lies 1,800 km (1,100 mi) to the southwest.