E. Rossoni notes that Malacrino is a very rare form, apparently concentrated in the Reggio Calabria area, and considers it a variant of Malacrinò, also fairly rare and specific to that same area —in particular to Montebello Ionico and Melito di Porto Salvo. Rossoni further documents the forms Malagrinò and Malagrino, related to the provinces of Cosenza and Taranto.

The authors agree that the surname is of Greek origin and derives from the term melachrinós —in modern Greek, "dark", referring to someone with dark hair or skin. G. Rohlfs cites directly the Greek form μελαχροινός and notes that in Greece it survives as a surname, while Rossoni specifies that Melachrinos is indeed a current Greek surname. Rohlfs characterizes the origin as Greco-Byzantine; Rossoni, for his part, describes it as Grico or Greco-Albanian, and introduces an important distinction: in the case of the Arvanite communities, Malagrinò and its variants would derive directly from the Greek surname, especially in the Cosenza and Taranto areas, territories with a strong presence of arbëreshë surnames —that is, of Albanian or Greco-Albanian origin.

Rossoni concludes that it is a matter of the fixing as a surname of nicknames or personal names of the ancestors. Rohlfs, who refers to Malagrinò as the form of reference, adds that the surname is also recorded in Sicily and that the variant without the accent —Malacrino— may correspond to a loss of the written accent in migratory contexts.