The term taxonomy is derived from the Greek meaning - taxis is “arrangement” and nomos is “law”. Taxonomy is the branch of science involving the identification, description, and classification of organisms systematically in a hierarchical manner into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

Classification is a multistep process that involves a hierarchy of steps. Each step of the hierarchy represents a rank or category called taxon/taxa. The category is part of the arrangement of taxonomy, so it is also called a taxonomic category. A taxon may be a group of organisms classified as a unit. This can be specific or general. For example, we could say that each human is a taxon at the species level since they're all an equivalent species, but we could also say that humans, along with all other primates, are a taxon at the order level since all of them belong to the Primates.