E. De Felice notes that this surname derives from the place name Scordia, a locality of the province of Catania, in Sicily.

E. Rossoni proposes a different etymology: the surname and its variants would derive from nicknames based on the Greek word skordo ("garlic"), or else from Italianizations of the Greek surname Skordas, of the same root. Rossoni documents the transformation into a surname in Bovalino in 1697. The forms Scordia and Scordio, very rare, correspond to the area comprising Calabria and Sicily, while Scordo is typical of the Reggio Calabria area and of eastern Sicily.