Order

Order is a taxonomic rank that sits above family. While the lower categories such as species, genus and family are recognised on the basis of a fairly large set of shared characters, the higher categories are worked out from the overall aggregate of characters rather than a long list of specific ones.

Being a higher category, an order is an assemblage of families that resemble one another in a small number of common features. Because it groups whole families together, the characters that all its members share are fewer than the characters that unite the different genera placed within a single family. In other words, as we climb from family to order the members still belong together, but they agree in fewer respects.

Examples …