It derives its common name and the scientific name, Linaria, from its fondness for hemp seeds and flax seeds—flax being the English name of the plant from which linen is made.

In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus included the common linnet in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name, Acanthis cannabina.

It is partially resident, but many eastern and northern birds migrate farther south in the breeding range or move to the coasts.

This species can form large flocks outside the breeding season, sometimes mixed with other finches, such as twite, on coasts and salt marshes.

and also mentions the bird in his poem "A Prayer for My Daughter" (1919): "May she become a flourishing hidden tree That all her thoughts may like the linnet be, And have no business but dispensing round Their magnanimities of sound."

In the 1840 novel The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, the heroine Nell keeps "only a poor linnet" in a cage, which she leaves for Kit as a sign of her gratefulness to him.

The English Baroque composer John Blow composed an ode on the occasion of the death of his colleague Henry Purcell, "An Ode on the Death of Mr. Purcell" set to the poem "Mark how the lark and linnet sing" by the poet John Dryden.

Robert Burns's 1788 poem "A Mother's Lament for the Death of Her Son" also tells of a linnet bird bewailing her ravished young.

But the fellow English poet Robert Bridges used the common linnet instead to express the limitations of poetry—concentrating on the difficulty in poetry of conveying the beauty of a bird's song.

He wrote in the first verse: I heard a linnet courting His lady in the spring: His mates were idly sporting, Nor stayed to hear him sing His song of love.— I fear my speech distorting His tender love.