Etymology: Found in most of the European languages between 12th and 15th centuries; compare Old French boquerant (12th cent.), bouqueran , bouquerrant , bouguerant , modern French bougran , Provençal bocaran , Catalan bocaram (Diez), Spanish bucaran , Italian bucherame (in Boccaccio 14th cent.), medieval Latin (in France) boquerannus , bucaranus , (in Italy) buchiranus ; also Middle High German buggeram , buggeran , buckeram , Middle Dutch bocraen , bocrael , bollecraen , boucraen . In early continental and apparently in early English use it denoted a costly and delicate fabric, sometimes of cotton and sometimes of linen; but it afterwards acquired the sense of coarse gummed linen used for linings, thus becoming synonymous with Spanish bocací , French boucassin , bocasin n.; and this meaning it retains in modern English, French, and Italian (The Middle High German lexicographers state that in that language the word meant ‘a fabric of goat's hair’, but this explanation may perhaps be a conjecture founded on a supposed derivation < German bock buck n.¹) As the English forms generally have m, while all the French forms have n, it is possible that the word may have been adopted into English not from French but from Italian. For the history of the word in Europe, and its probable changes of meaning, see Col. Yule's Marco Polo I. 46–48 and 59. Of the ultimate etymology nothing is really known. Some refer to Italian bucherare ‘to pierce full of holes’, supposing that the name was first given to a kind of muslin or net (compare quot. 1548 at sense 1). Reiske (in Constantin. Porphyrog. ed. Niebuhr II. 530) proposes Arabic abū qirām ‘pannus cum intextis figuris’, but he does not say where he found this compound; the simple qirām is of doubtful meaning, the Arab lexicographers quoted in the Qāmūs giving the various renderings ‘red veil’, ‘striped and figured woollen cloth’, ‘thin veil’ (Freytag, s.v.). Others suggest derivation < Bokhara, or < Bulgaria, but this does not agree with the early French forms.

Etymology: < buckram n.