Family name origins & meanings
- Southern Italian : nickname from pelecano, pelicano ‘woodpecker’, from pelyx ‘axe’. The Greek word was also used as an occupational nickname denoting a carpenter or ‘axe wielder’, and the surname may derive from this sense.
- Southern Italian : occupational name for a tanner, pelacani, also used in a figurative sense, as a nickname for a rough, rude, or coarse person. In some cases it may have been a euphemistic alteration of pellacane ‘rogue’, ‘pilferer’.