Pech Family History
Pech Name Meaning
Czech and Slovak; Sorbian (Pěch and P'ech): from a pet form of the personal name Petr (Czech) Pětš (Lower Sorbian) and Peter (Slovak). This is also a Germanized form of the Upper Sorbian cognate Pjech. German and Jewish (Ashkenazic): from Middle High German pech (German Pech) ‘pitch tar’ presumably a nickname for someone with exceptionally dark skin or hair or a metonymic occupational name for someone who prepared sold or used pitch. This may in part also be the origin of a homonymic Polish Czech and Slovak surname (compare above and below). Jewish (Ashkenazic) Polish Czech and Slovak: nickname from German Pech or from the West Slavic loanword pech ‘bad luck’. Such is a figurative sense of words with the original meaning ‘pitch tar’ in some Slavic languages too (compare Smola ). Catalan: nickname from a variant of pec ‘simple naive’. Amerindian (Mexico Guatemala and Belize): Mayan name from pech ‘tick’ (a mite) and possibly also from a homonymous word meaning ‘bastard’.
Source: Dictionary of American Family Names 2nd edition, 2022