Nixon (1937, 1940) provided morphology-based keys to the Asian Telenomus known at that time.T. dignus belongs to the subgenus Telenomus (Telenomus), the species of which have females with 11-antennomeres (10 antennomeres in the subgenus Telenomus (Aholcus)). Within Telenomus (Telenomus), T. dignus belongs to the nominate dignus species group, established by Nixon (1937). Species currently belonging to this group are:

• T. beneficiens (Zehntner)
• T. chilocolus Wu & Chen
• T. dignoides Nixon
• T. dignus (Gahan)
• T. globosus Bin & Johnson
• T. ostriniae Chen & Wu
• T. pontus Nixon
• T. rowani (Gahan)
• T. scirophagae Wu & Chen
• T. sorus Nixon

T. dignus can be distinguished from the others by the following combination of characters

• Metasomal tergum 1 strongly ridged
• Metasomal tergum 2 equally broad at the base and apex; metasoma slightly more than 2x its greatest width;
• Mesosoma only slightly longer than broad, not noticeably elongate
• Female and male antennae
• Male genitalia.
• Proportions of eyes to head

There may be some undiscovered synonymy among the species in the T. dignus-group, and/or cryptic species may be present (see Polaszek & Kimani, 1990; Polaszek et al, 1992)No nucleotide sequence data are available for T. dignus.