The hooded butcherbird was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his "Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux" from a specimen collected in New Guinea by the naturalist Pierre Sonnerat. 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. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name "Ramphastos cassicus" in his catalogue of the "Planches Enluminées". The type locality was restricted to Vogelkop (Bird's Head Peninsula), northwest New Guinea, by the American biologist Ernst Mayr in 1941. The hooded butcherbird is now placed in the genus "Cracticus" that was introduced in 1816 by the French ornithologist Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot with the hooded butcherbird as the type species. The generic name is from the Ancient Greek "kraktikos " meaning "noisy" or "clamorous". The specific epithet "cassicus" is from the French "Cassican" which in turn is from "Cassique", the French word for cacique used from orioles.