E. De Felice notes that this surname belongs to a lexical family linked to the term "cherry", which groups together surnames formed both from names and nicknames related to that fruit and from place names that allude to localities characterised by cherry trees. In its form Ceresa, De Felice places it mainly in northern Italy.

R. Brondolo specifies the dialectal origin of the base term: ceresa or seresa are dialectal forms of northern Italy equivalent to "cherry". This phonetic variant explains the northern geographical distribution of the surname, differentiated from the forms Cerasa, peculiar to central and southern Italy, and Cirasa, recorded in southern Calabria and in Sicily.