'bambocciade' originates from Italian, specifically the word 'bambocciata', where 'bamboccio' was a nickname meaning 'big baby' or 'puppet/ugly doll' (applied as a nickname to the Dutch painter Pieter van Laer).

'bambocciata' grew from the nickname 'Il Bamboccio' (Pieter van Laer), was used for the small-scale, often comic genre scenes painted by the circle called the Bamboccianti in 17th-century Rome, and entered English usage as the loanword 'bambocciade' to denote those paintings or the style.

Initially it referred to the artist's nickname and then to the scenes associated with him; over time it came to mean the genre of small, low-life genre scenes or an individual painting in that style.