Different authors have used different methods and nomenclatures to describe bird nests of the Neotropical region, leading to muddled terminology which makes comparisons among published data difficult. The present study suggests a standardization and a hierarchy of criteria which make easier to understand nest structures and allow direct comparisons among data from different authors in reports on bird evolution, conservation, phylogeny, etc. For that, the nest has been defined as any place where the eggs are laid. Four elementary nest standards are proposed: simple (when eggs rest on an unlined or roughly lined floor), cup (any basket or bowl-like form), closed (when the walls completely cover the incubatory chamber), and cavity (when they are placed inside natural or artificial cavities). The simple standard has two variants: unlined and platform. The cup standard has two variants: high cup and low cup; the closed standard has six variants: long, globular, furnace, irregular, ovoid and retort. The cavity standard presents simple, cup, or closed nests inside, each one with or without an access tunnel to its interior. When hierarchically ordered, these four elementary standards, their variants and the four main ways by which nests are attached to substrate (by their bases, by their laterals, by a branch fork, or pensile) proved to be efficient for the description of neotropical nests, as shown by the examples given in the text including 97 species, 88 genera, and 33 families from more than 9 countries. These combinations, totaling 30 basic nest types, allow easy evaluation of important inter- and intra-specific differences and of the evolutionary processes which are relevant to taxonomy and conservation. In addition, suggestions for making and keeping scientific nest collections are presented.