Surname whose origin is associated with the Venetian suffix -otto, which indicates provenance (for example Chiozzotto, from Chioggia; Rovigotto, from Rovigo). The Battaiotto take their surname from Battaglia Terme, a comune in the province of Padua, or from Battaglia, a hamlet of Fagagna, in the province of Udine.

A particularity of Venetian and Friulian compared with standard Italian is the simplification of the sound /ʎ/, represented in Italian spelling by the digraph gl before i (as in figlio, famiglia, battaglia, meglio). What in Italian is pronounced with that palatal lateral consonant is reduced in the northeastern dialects to a semivowel /j/, equivalent to the y of the English "yes". Thus figlio becomes fio or fiolo, famiglia becomes fameia, meglio becomes meio and battaglia becomes bataia or bataja.

When this dialectal feature crystallised in a surname before the orthographic Italianisation of the 19th century, it became fixed in the official spelling: Battaiotto preserves the Venetian phonetics of the place name Battaglia (with a yod instead of a palatal lateral), and the i of the surname functions, to the attentive reader, as an unmistakable regional mark —an indication that the family settled in Veneto or Friuli at a time when the local dialect prevailed over the Tuscan norm.