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.

[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 Ramphastos cassicus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

[4] The type locality was restricted to Vogelkop (Bird's Head Peninsula), northwest New Guinea, by the American biologist Ernst Mayr in 1941.

The three form a monophyletic group within the genus, having diverged from ancestors of the grey butcherbird around five million years ago.

Birds may duet with each other, or mimic other species such as the rusty pitohui, little shrikethrush, spangled drongo, or helmeted friarbird.