Southern Italian: from garofalo ‘carnation’, from Greek karyophyllon, standard modern Italian garofano. Southern Italian Greek has the more conservative karofaddho; the standard modern Greek form is garifalo. This is presumably a nickname for one who habitually sported a carnation, a topographic name for someone who lived where carnations grew, or a metonymic occupational name for a grower or seller of these flowers. De Felice notes that the Calabrese and Sicilian dialect forms, garofalu and garofolo, denote other species of plant, as well as a whirlwind or vortex, senses which could also have contributed to the surname.