It remains widespread and locally fairly common, and consequently has been rated as least concern on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

The great-billed parrot 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.

[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 name Psittacus megalorynchos in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

The specific epithet megalorynchos combines the Ancient Greek megalos "great" and rhunkhos "bill".