The rusty-collared seedeater was included by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1775 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.[2] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial nameLoxia collaris in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.[4] Buffon mistaken believed that his specimen had come from Angola. In 1904 the Austrian ornithologist Carl Eduard Hellmayr designated the type location as Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.[5][6] The rusty-collared seedeater is now placed in the genus Sporophila that was introduced by the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis in 1844.[7][8] The genus name combines the Ancient Greeksporos meaning "seed" and philos meaning "-loving". The specific collaris is Latin for "of the neck".[9]