The lined seedeater was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial nameLoxia lineola.[2] Linnaeus mistakenly specified the "habitat" as Asia; the type locality was subsequently designated as the state of Bahia in Brazil.[3] The specific epithet lineola is Latin meaning "little line" (a diminutive of linea meaning "line").[4] The lined seedeater is now assigned to the genusSporophila that was introduced by the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis in 1844.[5][6] The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.[6]
de Schauensee, Rodolphe Meyer (1952). "A review of the genus Sporophila". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 104: 175–181. JSTOR4064459.