Peanuts are rich in protein and lipids, which are widely cultivated in the north and south regions of China. As one of the main oil crops in China, the identification of peanut varieties is very important for breeding new varieties, improving oil production and processing quality. The commonly used detection methods such as experience identification, physical and chemical detection are all time-consuming and difficult to operate, could not meet the current rapid detection requirements well. So it is necessary to explore a rapid and efficient testing method for peanut varieties’ identification. Terahertz attenuated total reflection (THz-ATR) spectroscopy combined with distance matching algorithm (DM) were used to achieve the rapid identification of different varieties of peanut. A total of 60 peanut samples’ ATR spectrum in 0.3~3.6THz which included three varieties of peanuts: Huayu 36, Luhua 1 and Luhua 9 were collected randomly. Then the first derivative of ATR absorption coefficients were normalized to establish DM model and identify different peanut varieties rapidly. The final DM model result showed that the overall recognition accuracy of the three categories can reach 93.3%, with only one sample was misclassified. The research results showed that using THz-ATR to rapid detection and identification of peanut varieties had certain feasibility, and the method can be applied to other crop variety rapid identification and quality analysis because of its simpleoperation and efficient characteristics.