Episode 162: The Pirate Queen
The History of English Podcast
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The History of Buccaneer and Barbacoa
The word buccaneer finds its ultimate origins in the Tupi language, which was an indigenous language spoken in Brazil. The people who spoke that language prepared and preserved meat by smoking it on a wooden framework called a buccane. By the mid-1600s, that term had become a general word for a pirate in French. Then around that time, English borrowed the word from French.
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