F. De Laurentiis considers this surname a variant of Gozzi.

V. Blunda offers a more detailed analysis. He classifies it as a Sicilian surname of Germanic root, derived from the personal name Gauta, linked to the ethnonym of the Geats, a Scandinavian people settled in the south of present-day Sweden. He warns that the popular reading associating the surname with the Italian gozzo —crop, double chin or swelling of the neck— is a false etymology: that common noun derives from the Late Latin guttur ("throat"), with no relation to the Germanic ethnonym that gives rise to the personal name. According to Blunda, the consonant doubling -zz- is proper to Italian anthroponymy, where it marks affective or intensive forms. The surname survives especially in Sicily and in areas of southern Italy.