The masked laughingthrush was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[2] The specific epithet perspicillatus is Modern Latin meaning "spectacled".

[3] Gmelin based his description on "Le Merle de la Chine" that had been described in 1775 by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

[4] A hand-coloured engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet was published to accompany Buffon's text.

[6] The masked laughingthrush was formerly placed in the genus Garrulax but following the publication of a comprehensive molecular phylogenetic study of the laughingthrushes in 2018, it was moved to the resurrected genus Pterorhinus that had been introduced by the English zoologist Robert Swinhoe in 1868.