Other forms: buccaneers
A buccaneer was a pirate of the old Caribbean. A buccaneer crew.
Many operated with a licence from a government, which made them privateers rather than pirates. The word comes from a grill for smoking meat, which is what the first ones lived by.
1nounbuccaneerA pirate of the old Caribbean.
“The buccaneer fleet took four ships in a single week.”
buccaneer is a pirate.
French boucanier comes from boucan, a Tupi word for a wooden grill used to smoke meat.
French
boucanier
English, today
buccaneer
Built from
Borrowed from French boucanier. From French boucanier, from boucaner (“to smoke or broil meat and fish, to hunt wild beasts for their skins”), from boucan (“(Tupi-style) grill”), from tpw moka'ẽ (“wooden grill”). by surface analysis, buccan + -eer.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA