buccaneer [M17th] A buccaneer was originally a French hunter of wild oxen in South America or the Caribbean who cooked meat on a wooden frame over an open fire. The name for this frame was a boucan, a word that came through French from mukem, a word in the Tupi language of the Amazon basin. Later in the same century people began to apply buccaneer to a pirate of the Spanish American coasts, because the hunters changed career.