A framed saw for wood
A bucksaw is a hand saw built for cutting wood to length. Its blade is a straight, toothed strip held taut in a frame, most often H-shaped, sometimes bow-shaped or open like a C. The usual job is a crosscut: across the grain, shortening a log or a stick of firewood that lies on a sawhorse. You work it with both hands. In North American hardware aisles the same object may still be sold under that name; elsewhere the label bow saw is common.
Nothing in current use points to hunting. The tool belongs to the yard and the woodshed. Coarse teeth take timber and firewood; a finer blade can be fitted when a cleaner cut is wanted.
An American name from the 1850s
The origin of the word bucksaw is a straightforward English compound, not a borrowing of a foreign tool-name as a finished unit. Lexicographers analyze it as buck plus saw. One standard American dictionary records the first known use in 1856. Others give the slightly wider window 1855–60 and mark the word as an Americanism. The same formation, from buck, is the account in general-purpose etymologies of the English entry.
Speakers did not import a Dutch or German noun for this particular saw. They joined two English words already in circulation, on this side of the Atlantic, in the woodlot vocabulary of the mid-nineteenth century.
Saw, an old Germanic cutter
Saw, the second element, is native. Middle English had forms such as saue; Old English had sagu. Behind those stands a Germanic word for a toothed cutting tool, reconstructed along the lines of *sago, from an Indo-European root *sek- meaning to cut, the family that also yields Latin secare. The Germanic cognates sit close to the English noun: Dutch zaag, German Säge, Swedish såg, Danish sav, Norwegian sag, Old Norse sög. English seax, an old word for a knife, belongs to the same cutting root.
None of that history is special to the compound. Any English saw-word sits on that stem. The distinctive piece is the first half.
Buck as a trestle, not a deer
In this name, buck is the frame that holds the wood. American English used buck for a sawhorse by the early nineteenth century: a rack of two X-shaped ends joined by a bar. Etymological references put that sense around 1817 and derive it, with some caution, from Dutch bok, which means both a he-goat and a trestle. Dutch zaagbok is a sawhorse. German Sägebock is the matching compound. English sawbuck, recorded as a wooden horse by the 1830s, is generally treated as a partial translation of zaagbok: zaag rendered as saw, bok as buck.
The animal image is real, but it belongs to the stand. Germanic workshop talk often names supports after four-legged beasts that stand stiffly; English easel comes from Dutch ezel, a donkey. A goat under the log is the same habit. Older English definitions of the saw say it is used with both hands in cutting wood on a support called a buck. American dictionaries still define the noun as a framed blade used on a sawbuck or sawhorse.
Forestry English later uses the verb buck, and the noun bucking, for sawing a felled, delimbed tree into shorter logs. A specialist at that cut may be called a bucker or a buck sawyer. In British forestry the same work is more often called crosscutting or logging-up. Dictionaries of the verb treat it as an English conversion from the noun. How tightly the verb and the trestle influenced each other in every camp is not spelled out in the sources, and it is better not to force a single story. For the tool-name, the agreed analysis remains buck (the horse) plus saw (the cutter).
A reader who meets the word cold may guess at a male deer. That guess is folk morphology. The compound does not mean a saw for cutting bucks, and it does not come from the Old English animal word by a separate path. The deer, the goat, and the trestle share a Germanic animal name, but the English tool-word attaches to the trestle sense.
What the word did not do
The sense has not wandered far. Since it appeared, bucksaw has named a framed woodcutting saw. It did not take on the slang life of sawbuck, which also came to mean a ten-dollar bill because the X-shaped ends of the horse looked like the Roman numeral on nineteenth-century notes. The saw itself never meant a deer, a dollar, or a gymnasium vaulting block, even though those are other lives of buck.
The object under the name did change. A traditional bucksaw in English and American woodworking talk is a wooden frame saw: cheeks as the uprights of an H, a stretcher as the crossbar, a thin blade in tension, and a turnbuckle or a twisted cord on the opposite side of the stretcher. Coarse teeth take firewood; a narrow blade can turn in the cut. Twentieth-century shop versions often use a tubular metal frame, H-shaped or C-shaped, with a replaceable blade held taut by the frame. Folding camp saws sit in the same family. Trade names overlap: bow saw, Swede saw, bushman saw, Finn saw. The Swede-saw story is later product history, often linked to tubular frames associated with Sandvikens Jernverk in the 1920s, not an older etymology of the English compound.
Frame and bow saws as tools are far older than that compound. Histories of technology describe bow-saws in China and in the Hellenistic world. That is the implement traveling. The English word is a mid-nineteenth-century American label for the saw you take to a sawbuck.
Keep the inversion
Sawbuck and bucksaw are anagrams, and they swap which half is the head of the compound. One is the horse, calqued from a Dutch goat-trestle. The other is the saw that belongs on that horse. The goat is in the stand, not in the blade, and the English tool-name is only a little older than 1856.