Alucita is the largest genus of many-plumed moths (family Alucitidae); it is also the type genus of its family and the disputed superfamily Alucitoidea. This genus occurs almost worldwide and contains about 180 species as of 2011[update]; new species are still being described and discovered regularly.[citation needed] Formerly, many similar moths of superfamilies Alucitoidea, Copromorphoidea and Pterophoroidea were also placed in Alucita.[citation needed]
The genus Alucita was established by Carl Linnaeus in the 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae as a subgenus of Phalaena, Linné's "wastebin genus" for moths[citation needed]. Johan Christian Fabricius in 1775 seems to have been the first author to consider Alucita a genus in its own right, and it remains so until today.[citation needed] However, some subsequent authors[who?] believed Linnaeus' name to be invalid, and established alternative names for this genus, but, while the oldest of these, Pierre André Latreille's Orneodes, was used instead of Alucita for a long time, all these subsequent names are today recognized as junior synonyms.[1]