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Order () is one of the eight major hierarchical taxonomic ranks in Linnaean taxonomy. It is classified between family and class. In biological classification, the order is a taxonomic rank used in the classification of organisms and recognized by the nomenclature codes. An immediately higher rank, superorder, is sometimes added directly above order, with suborder directly beneath order. An order can also be defined as a group of related families.
What does and does not belong to each order is determined by a taxonomist, as is whether a particular order should be recognized at all. Often there is no exact agreement, with different taxonomists each taking a different position. There are no hard rules that a taxonomist needs to follow in describing or recognizing an order. Some taxa are accepted almost universally, while others are recognized only rarely.
The name of an order is usually written with a capital letter. For some groups of organisms, their orders may follow consistent naming schemes. Orders of , fungi, and use the suffix -ales (e.g. Dictyotales). Orders of and use the Latin suffix -iformes meaning 'having the form of' (e.g. Passeriformes), but orders of , , and are not so consistent (e.g. Artiodactyla, Frog, Crocodylia, Actiniaria, Primates).
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| Boreoeutheria |
| Euarchontoglires, Laurasiatheria |
| Euarchonta, Ferungulata |
| Primatomorpha, Ferae |
| Primate, Procolophonomorpha |
| Haplorrhini, Procolophonia |
| Simiiformes, Tarsiiformes |
| Catarrhini, Baleen whale |
In their 1997 classification of Mammal, Malcolm McKenna and Bell used two extra levels between superorder and order: grandorder and mirorder. Michael Novacek (1986) inserted them at the same position. Michael Benton (2005) inserted them between superorder and magnorder instead. This position was adopted by Systema Naturae 2000 and others.
The superorder rank is commonly used, with the ending -anae that was initiated by Armen Takhtajan's publications from 1966 onwards.
In French botanical publications, from Michel Adanson's Familles naturelles des plantes (1763) and until the end of the 19th century, the word famille (plural: familles) was used as a French equivalent for this Latin ordo. This equivalence was explicitly stated in the Alphonse Pyramus de Candolle's Lois de la nomenclature botanique (1868), the precursor of the currently used International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants.
In the first international Rules of botanical nomenclature from the International Botanical Congress of 1905, the word family (familia) was assigned to the rank indicated by the French famille, while order (ordo) was reserved for a higher rank, for what in the 19th century had often been named a 'cohort' (cohors, Page 1. plural cohortes).
Some of the plant families still retain the names of Linnaean "natural orders" or even the names of pre-Linnaean natural groups recognized by Linnaeus as orders in his natural classification (e.g. Palmae or Labiatae). Such names are known as descriptive family names.
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