Also 6–7 tiberune, tuberon. [a. F. tiburon (Joubert, Hist. Poiss., 1558), tibéron, tiburin (Littré), Sp. tiburon (tiburónes péces, in Minsheu) = It. tiburino (Florio), Pg. tubarão. Origin uncertain; prob. taken into Sp. or Pg. from some W. Indian or E. Indian lang.] A name given by 16–17th-c. navigators to one or more large species of shark; applied specifically to the bonnet-headed shark, Reniceps tiburo; now, on the Mexican Pacific coast, to Carcharinus fronto.
1555. Eden, Decades, 201. The Tiburon … is a very great fysshe and very quicke and swifte in the water, and a cruell deuourer…. The sayde Tuberon [etc.].
1565. Sir J. Hawkins, 2nd Voy. W. Ind. (Hakl. Soc.), 22. Many sharks or Tuberons … came about the ships [Sierra Leone].
[1579. T. Stevens, Lett. fr. Goa, in Hakluyt, Voy. (1589), 161. There waited on our ship [in the Atlantic within the Tropics] fishes as long as a man, which they cal Tuberones.
1598. W. Phillip, Linschoten, I. xlviii. (Hakl. Soc.), II. 12 There is in the rivers, and also in the Sea along the coast of India great store of fishes, which the Portingalls call Tubaron or Hayen.]
1622. R. Hawkins, Voy. S. Sea, 68. The shark, or tiberune, is a fish like unto those which wee call dogge-fishes, but that he is farre greater.
1796. Morse, Amer. Geog., I. 728. Fish common to both oceans … sword fish, saw fish, tiburones, manitis.
