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Cladistics (from Greek κλάδος ‘branch’ and the suffix -istic from Greek -ιστικός) is "a method of classification that groups taxa hierarchically into discrete sets and subsets. Cladistics can be used to organise organize any comparative data (e.g. linguistics) but its greatest application has been in the field of biological systematics. Cladistics methods were made explicit by the German entomologist Willi Hennig (1950), and became widely known to English speakers in 1965 and 1966 under the name 'phylogenetic systematics'. (...) The aim of cladistic analysis is to hypothesize the sister-group hierarchy and express the results in terms of branching diagrams. These diagrams are called cladograms, a reference to the fact that | they purport to express genealogical units or clades." (Kitching et al. 1998, 1-2).
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