The goal of classifying is to place an organism into an already existing group or to create a new group for it, based on its resemblances to and differences from known forms. To this end, a hierarchy of categories is recognized.

For example, an ordinary flowering plant, on the basis of gross structure, is clearly one of the higher green plants—not a fungus, bacterium, or animal—and it can easily be placed in the kingdom Plantae (or Metaphyta). If the body of the plant has distinct leaves, roots, a stem, and flowers, it is placed with the other true flowering plants in the division Magnoliophyta (or Angiospermae), one subcategory of the Plantae. If it is a lily, with swordlike leaves, with the parts of the flowers in multiples of three, and with one cotyledon (the incipient leaf) in the embryo, it belongs with other lilies, tulips, palms, orchids, grasses, and sedges in a subgroup of the Magnoliophyta, which is called the class Liliatae (or Monocotyledones). In this class it is placed, rather than with orchids or grasses, in a subgroup of the Liliatae, the order Liliales.

This procedure is continued to the species level. Should the plant be different from any lily yet known, a new species is named, as well as higher taxa, if necessary. If the plant is a new species within a well-known genus, a new species name is simply added to the appropriate genus. If the plant is very different from any known monocot, it might require, even if only a single new species, the naming of a new genus, family, order, or higher taxon. There is no restriction on the number of forms in any particular group. The number of ranks that is recognized in a hierarchy is a matter of widely varying opinion. Shown in Table 1 are seven ranks that are accepted as obligatory by zoologists and botanists.

In botany the term division is often used as an equivalent to the term phylum of zoology. The number of ranks is expanded as necessary by using the prefixes sub-, super-, and infra- (e.g., subclass, superorder) and by adding other intermediate ranks, such as brigade, cohort, section, or tribe. Given in full, the zoological hierarchy for the timber wolf of the Canadian subarctic would be as follows:

Kingdom Animalia

Subkingdom Metazoa

Phylum Chordata

Subphylum Vertebrata

Superclass Tetrapoda

Class Mammalia

Subclass Theria

Infraclass Eutheria

Cohort Ferungulata

Superorder Ferae

Order Carnivora

Suborder Fissipeda

Superfamily Canoidea

Family Canidae

Subfamily Caninae

Tribe (none described for this group)

Genus Canis

Subgenus (none described for this group)

Species Canis lupus (wolf)

Subspecies Canis lupus occidentalis (northern timber wolf)

Although the name of the species is binomial (e.g., Canis lupus) and that of the subspecies trinomial (C. lupus occidentalis for the northern timber wolf, C. lupus lupus for the northern European wolf), all other names are single words. In zoology, convention dictates that the names of superfamilies end in -oidea, and the code dictates that the names of families end in -idae, those of subfamilies in -inae, and those of tribes in -ini. Unfortunately, there are no widely accepted rules for other major divisions of living things, because each major group of animals and plants has its own taxonomic history and old names tend to be preserved. Apart from a few accepted endings, the names of groups of high rank are not standardized and must be memorized.

The discovery of a living coelacanth fish of the genus Latimeria in 1938 caused virtually no disturbance of the accepted classification, since the suborder Coelacanthi was already well known from fossils. When certain unusual worms were discovered in the depths of the oceans about 10 years later, however, it was necessary to create a new phylum, Pogonophora, for them since they showed no close affinities to any other known animals. The phylum Pogonophora, as usually classified, has one class—the animals in the phylum are relatively similar—but there are two orders, several families and genera, and more than 100 species. Both of these examples have been widely accepted by authorities in their respective areas of taxonomy and may be considered stable taxa.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that there are no explicit taxonomic characters that define a phylum, class, order, or other rank. A feature characteristic of one phylum may vary in another phylum among closely related members of a class, order, or some lower group. The complex carbohydrate cellulose is characteristic of two kingdoms of plants, but among animals cellulose occurs only in one subphylum of one phylum. It would simplify the work of the taxonomist if characters diagnostic of phylum rank in animals were always taken from one feature, the skeleton, for example; those of class rank, from the respiratory organs; and so on down the taxonomic hierarchy. Such a system, however, would produce an unnatural classification.

The taxonomist must first recognize natural groups and then decide on the rank that should be assigned them. Are sea squirts, for instance, so clearly linked by the structure of the extraordinary immature form (larva) to the phylum Chordata, which includes all the vertebrates, that they should be called a subphylum, or should their extremely modified adult organization be deemed more important, with the result that sea squirts might be recognized as a separate phylum, albeit clearly related to the Chordata? At present, this sort of question has no precise answer.

Some biologists believe that “numerical taxonomy,” a system of quantifying characteristics of taxa and subjecting the results to multivariate analysis, may eventually produce quantitative measures of overall differences among groups and that agreement can be achieved so as to establish the maximal difference allowed each taxonomic level. Although such agreement may be possible, many difficulties exist. An order in one authority’s classification may be a superorder or class in another. Most of the established classifications of the better-known groups result from a general consensus among practicing taxonomists. It follows that no complete definition of a group can be made until the group itself has been recognized, after which its common (or most usual) characters can be formally stated. As further information is obtained about the group, it is subject to taxonomic revision.