The green honeycreeper was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under its current binomial name Motacilla spiza.

[3] Linnaeus based his description on the "green black-cap fly-catcher" that the English naturalist George Edwards had described and illustrated in his 1743 book A Natural History of Uncommon Birds.

[4] In 1853 the German naturalist Ludwig Reichenbach erected the genus Chlorophanes to accommodate the green honeycreeper.

The female green honeycreeper is grass-green, paler on the throat, and lacks the male's iridescence and black head.

The female green honeycreeper builds a small cup nest in a tree, and incubates the clutch of two brown-blotched white eggs for 13 days.