The hooded tanager was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1779 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana.[2] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial nameTanagra pileata in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.[4] The hooded tanager is now placed in the genus Nemosia that was introduced by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot in 1816 with the hooded tanager as the type species.[5][6][7] The genus name is from the Ancient Greeknemos meaning "glade" or "dell". The specific pileata is from the Latin pileatus meaning "-capped".[8]