In 1760 the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson included a description of the red-capped cardinal in the supplement to his Ornithologie based on a specimen collected in "America". He used the French name Le cardinal d'Amérique and the Latin name Cardinalis americanis.[2] Although Brisson coined Latin names, these do not conform to the binomial system and are not recognised by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.[3] When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the twelfth edition he added 240 species that had been previously described by Brisson in his Ornithologie.[3] One of these was the red-capped cardinal. Linnaeus included a terse description, coined the binomial name Tanagra gularis and cited Brisson's work.[4] The specific name gularis is Latin for "of the throat".[5] The type locality has been restricted to French Guiana.[6] This species is now placed in the genus Paroaria that was introduced by the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1832.[7]