Word.ws English Dictionary

coureur de bois

coureur de bois noun: a fur trader operating in North America in the seventeenth or eighteenth century without permission from the French authorities.

Noun

coureur de bois (plural coureurs de bois)

  1. (historical) A fur trader operating in North America in the seventeenth or eighteenth century without permission from the French authorities.
    • Those who stayed in New France often fled the fields to take up lives in the wilderness, where they traded for furs with the Indians or simply “went native.” […] In contemporary terms, these woodsmen—or coureurs de bois—were first-generation immigrants to aboriginal societies whose cultures and...2011, Colin Woodard, chapter 2, in American Nations, New York: Penguin, →ISBN

Forms of coureur de bois

pluralcoureurs de bois
alternative formcoureur des bois

Origin of coureur de bois

Borrowed from French coureur des bois, literally “woods runner”.

Questions about coureur de bois

What does coureur de bois mean?
Coureur de bois means a fur trader operating in North America in the seventeenth or eighteenth century without permission from the French authorities.
What part of speech is coureur de bois?
Coureur de bois is a noun.
What is the plural of coureur de bois?
The plural of coureur de bois is coureurs de bois.

Words near coureur de bois in the dictionary

  1. courches
  2. Courcy
  3. coure
  4. coured
  5. coures
  6. coureur de bois
  7. coureurs de bois
  8. courgette
  9. courgettes
  10. courgetti
  11. couric

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: coureur de bois (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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