pirate

pirate, freebooter, buccaneer, privateer, corsair basically mean one who sails in search of plunder.

Pirate suggests a person or a ship or its crew that without a commission from an established civilized state cruises about in quest of ships to plunder. Since pirate in this sense is seldom used of contemporary life, the word has been extended to name one who wanders over a wide territory in search of plunder

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a band of 400 desert pirates ... raided the bazaar section and fled back across the river with their loot— Time

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or one who infringes upon a right legally restricted to another

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English books published by American pirates

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pirates of wavelengths in radio

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or one known for predatory business practices

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now my grandfather there who made the money . . . was a hard-boiled man of business. From your point of view he was a pirate— Edmund Wilson

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Freebooter often suggests a maritime plunderer who pursues his occupation without the excuse that his country is at war and then differs from pirate only in its connotations of membership in a less closely organized band and of use of less violent methods

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English freebooters who made life merry hell on the high seas for Spanish galleons waddling home from the Americas heavy-laden with gold— Dodge

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In extended use freebooter is often applied to one who seizes rights, privileges, and property on a large scale without regard to the restraints of law or of order

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many empire builders have been mere freebooters

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an era of comparably good feeling and incomparably good pickings. He took things easy, and his fellow freebooters took almost everything easily— Hodding Carter

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Buccaneer, primarily applied to early French residents of Haiti, is more generally used of these people and others who preyed, sometimes with the tacit consent of their own governments, on Spanish ships and settlements in the New World

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in the reign of Charles II, the buccaneers of the West Indian Islands were in the heyday of their romantic glory, as the unofficial maintainers of England's quarrels along the Spanish Main— Trevelyan

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The term is often extended to an unscrupulous adventurer (as in business or politics); in such use it need not be wholly disparaging but does regularly imply disregard of the rules observed by ordinary men

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one of the great building enterprises of the famous buccaneer out of which he is reputed to have made many millions— Strunsky

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there still exist outright buccaneers, men who will steal anything that isn't tied down— Sat. Review

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Privateer and corsair primarily apply to a ship privately owned but commissioned by its government (as in the 17th and 18th centuries) to prey upon other ships, usually those of an enemy, but in practice either term may designate a ship, its commander, or one of its crew. Corsair is applied chiefly to a ship, a commander, or a sailor of North African origin. Neither term has extensive extended use, but when so used they are quite distinct: privateer then applies to one doing in a private capacity what would normally be undertaken by a public official

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illegal [wire] taps by law enforcers and privateers continued unprosecuted— Westin

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but corsair attributes fury and rapacious cruelty to the one so-called

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corsairs among the reptiles— Swinton^

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had lately attacked, in corsair fashion, the Greek philosophers and had disembowelled Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of them, to his complete satisfaction— Norman Douglas

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