busk [M17th] Busking used to take place not in shopping centres but at sea. The word busk comes from Italian buscare or Spanish buscar, which both mean ‘to seek’. Its earliest use in English was in the nautical sense ‘to cruise about, tack’ or ‘to go from place to place, to seek’. In the middle of the 18th century it developed the sense, originally slang, of ‘to go about performing’.