The Taino, a tribe of Haitian people obliterated by European explorers and pirates, called a framework of sticks used for sleeping on or cooking over a barbacoa. The word was borrowed by the Spanish in the mid seventeenth century, and entered English as barbecue at the end of the seventeenth century. Its early use in English retained the sense of wooden framework, and thus some American writers of that century speak of sleeping on barbecues. By the early eighteenth century barbecue had come to mean only a device for roasting meat upon, and by the mid eighteenth century it had also been transferred to any food cooked in such a way. The popular claim that the word barbeque derives from the French barbe a queue—meaning beard to tail and supposedly referring to how animals were often barbecued whole or “head to foot”—is implausible for historical reasons: it was not till the early nineteenth century, two hundred years after the first appearance of barbecue, that it became fashionable for animals to grow beards.