Ornithocheiridae was named by Seeley (1870). Its type is Ornithocheirus.

It was synonymized subjectively with Pteranodontidae by Hay (1930); it was reranked as the subfamily Ornithocheirinae by Kuhn (1946); it was reranked as the unranked clade Ornithocheiridae by Unwin and Lü (1997), Unwin (2003), Unwin and Martill (2007), Martill and Unwin (2011) and Rodrigues and Kellner (2013).

It was assigned to Ornithocheiroidea by Williston (1897); to Rhamphorhynchoidea by Roxo (1937); to Pteranodontidae by Kuhn (1946); to Dsungaripteroidea by Young (1964); to Pterosauria by Zittel (1890) and Bakker (1986); to Euornithocheira by Unwin (2003); to Pterodactyloidea by Williston (1903), Nopcsa (1928), Delair (1958), Kuhn (1966), Charig (1967), Carroll (1988), Lee (1994) and Wang and Zhou (2006); to Ornithocheiroidea by Unwin and Lü (1997), Unwin and Martill (2007) and Martill and Unwin (2011); to Pteranodontoidea by Andres and Myers (2013); to Pterodactyloidea by Rodrigues and Kellner (2013); to Ornithocheiroidea by Jacobs et al. (2019); and to Ornithocheirae by Pentland et al. (2019).