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taxonomy

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Taxonomy is the science of classification of plants and animals. (noun)

An example of taxonomy is the way living beings are divided up into genus and species.

See taxonomy in Webster's New World College Dictionary

noun pl. taxonomies

the science of classification; laws and principles covering the classifying of objects
Biol. a system of arranging animals and plants into natural, related groups based on some factor common to each, as structure, embryology, or biochemistry: the basic taxa now in use are, in descending order from most inclusive, kingdom, phylum (in botany, division), class, order, family, genus, and species

Related Forms:

taxonomic adjective
taxonomically adverb
taxonomist noun

See taxonomy in American Heritage Dictionary 4

(tăk-sŏnˈə-mē)

noun pl. tax·on·o·mies

The classification of organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships.
The science, laws, or principles of classification; systematics.
Division into ordered groups or categories: “Scholars have been laboring to develop a taxonomy of young killers” (Aric Press).

Related Forms:

tax·onˈo·mist noun

Taxonomy of Life

The taxonomic organization of species is hierarchical. Each species belongs to a genus, each genus belongs to a family, and so on through order, class, phylum, and kingdom. Associations within the hierarchy reflect evolutionary relationships, which are deduced typically from morphological and physiological similarities between species. So, for example, species in the same genus are more closely related and more alike than species that are in different genera within the same family. Carolus Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish botanist, devised the system of binomial nomenclature used for naming species. In this system, each species is given a two-part Latin name, formed by appending a specific epithet to the genus name. By convention, the genus name is capitalized, and both the genus name and specific epithet are italicized, for Canis familiaris or simply C. familiaris. Modern taxonomy is currently in flux, and certain aspects of classification are being refined. This table shows one traditional classification of five species of life out of the estimated five million species of the world.

Common Name	Kingdom	Phylum*	Class	Order	Family	Genus	Species
Domesticated Dog	Animalia (animals)	Chordata	Mammalia	Carnivora	Canidae	Canis	C. familiaris
Sugar Maple	Plantae (plants)	Magnoliophyta	Rosidae	Sapindales	Aceraceae	Acer	A. saccharum
Bread Mold	Fungi (fungi)	Zygomycota	Zygomycetes	Mucoralis	Mucoraceae	Rhizopus	R. stolonifer
Tuberculosis Bacterium	Prokaryotae (bacteria)	Firmicutes	Actinobacteria	Actinomycetales	Mycobacteriaceae	Mycobacterium	M. tuberculosis
Pond Alga	Protista (algae, diatoms)	Chlorophyta	Euconjugatae	Zygnematalis	Zygnemataceae	Spirogyra	S. crassa